


Wellspring

by etherati



Series: Wellspring and Everything After [1]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: (Obviously), (not the sexy kind... at least not yet), Also babby Tref, And wildly post-hoc funerals, Blood Drinking, Canon-Typical Violence, Cleaning, Companionable Snark, Cooking, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Support Humans, F/M, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, M/M, Multi, Okay let's add a few more:, Post-Season/Series 02, Revelations, Self-Acceptance, Serious Injuries, The sexier kind of blood-drinking, Threesome - F/M/M, Trevor is so oblivious my friends, Vampires, Weird Biology, and a partridge in a pear tree, artist Alucard, because that's how i roll, building a better tomorrow, by talking about sex in the ghostly ruins of your childhood home, lots of talking, no plot only feels, sex with feels, the Belmonts have issues, weird and ominous sex scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-02-29 04:50:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 80,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18771550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: Wellspring (n): Where something begins.Trevor’s been throwing rocks and coins and shit into wells for most of his life, without any expectation of getting wishes granted or anything stupid like that. All he really wants is to know there's something down there.{Now with art! But not good art. Just my usual sketchy bullshit.}





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Trevor and Alucard focused, setting up for eventual OT3. Sypha still gets some of the best lines, though. <3
> 
> Edit for chapter 8: WHOOPS GUESS THE OT3 HAPPENED EARLY. they are advanced babies.

*

“Look, Tref,” Alina says, a tease creeping along the undersurface of her words. “It’s a bottomless faery well. Bet something really fierce lives down there, eh?”

The granite is cold under his palms, crisscrossed as they already are with old cuts and scars and still too small to span the width of the stone. It's an itching sort of cold, settling into his bones like a haunting, dank stale air wafting up from the depths they're all peering into—and at eight years old, Trevor Belmont knows with certainty that there is no such thing as a bottomless well. It's a thing of bedtime stories, gold rings and promises and witches’ spells. It’s the same sort of crap that makes the port town cartographers draw dragons out beyond the edge of the world, when the world is obviously a broad curving bow reaching back around on itself and sure, there are dragons out there, or something very much like them, but they don’t only dwell in those catastrophic shallows. He knows this because his family knows it, because there are things the Belmonts have always known and must know to do their work; there are enough real horrors in the world to deal with without inventing and imagining new ones, daring them into existence. The world is no tabletop with a cliff drop at the edge; the sun does not move round them like human life is all that matters in the cosmos; there is no such thing as a bottomless well.

He still reaches one hand out, dropping a pebble in to hear its quiet rattling descent, going on and on, skittering away and then swallowed up by the darkness and silence. No splash.

His father pushes away from the well in disgust. They're all thirsty, have been on the road for days, on the trail of some creature that’s been licking the village girls’ feet bloody and leaving them flowers while they sleep, petals singed black at the edges—a zmeu maybe, Trevor thinks, but the rest of the party disagrees so he’s keeping his mouth shut. And it's one thing to have to break up a well that's iced over, but there’s not even a sign of ice down there.

Trevor casts around behind himself, scouring through the frost and rot-sweet leaf litter for a larger stone, big and heavy enough that they'll really be able to hear if it hits something. Everyone else is giving up, but there's a crawling feeling up the back of his neck that is telling him, _something is not right here._

"It's dry, boy," his father says, cuffing him back from the edge just as he lets the stone drop; a normal child might have stumbled backward, slipped and fallen into the wet embankment. He just takes a steadying step back, feet stable on the slightly slick, uneven terrain, listening to the clunk and clatter of the rock going down and down and down. "We'll get nothing from it. Not worth our time."

"But—"

"What have we taught you," his father interrupts mildly, "About time, and strength?"

From the well: silence. No splash and no impact.

"Both are like the food in your bag," Trevor recites. "They don't last forever, and it's easier to carry what you have than to find more later."

"Good lad. Let’s keep moving; we might make a town by sunset."

So they move on. It's Alina’s hunt really, his eldest sister and the toughest hunter in their generation so far; he's just along to carry some of the gear, and watch and learn, and otherwise stay well back out of trouble. It'll be a year or two at least before they arm him on these outings with anything more than the short sword he uses to spar with at home, before they expect him to be able to sense the monsters on their tail before he sees them, before he'll be able to feel the tingling hum and burn in a consecrated weapon and channel it to its purpose. But there was something about that well—he's sure of it, even as they leave it behind them. Something he can feel in his skin and in his blood, something that makes his teeth itch and his hackles rise. Whatever is in there, it's for damn sure not _nothing_.

* *

He drops a lot of rocks into a lot of wells, from that point on—and bits of branches and bent old worthless coins, testing each and every one he comes across for that same eerie silence. Every mundane splash that echoes back up feels like a reprieve, like one more day before he’ll have to face whatever hungry thing it is that lurks in bottomless depths.

* *

Twenty-some years and one dead vampire lord later, wandering along a dry creekbed that Sypha has insisted is a common shortcut through these woods and which does feel weirdly familiar, he comes across the well again. Or _a_ well anyway; it might not be the same well—they’re all pretty much the same in the end, stones and moss and a bucket and so on. But he recognizes that weird tugging in the back of his brain, the same part of his awareness that tells his feet that he needs to dodge before the rest of him catches up, and it’s enough to make him halt the horses, hand the reins to Sypha and drop down from the wagon, wordlessly investigating.

She comes up behind him just as he’s letting a rock drop in; he shouts after it for good measure, but there’s no returning echo—just the distant ringing of stone on stone, fading. As in his memories of being here that first time: no sound of impact.

“What is it?” she asks, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to say, _A well_ , to laugh a little and say _You know, one of those things you pull water out of_ , just to watch her get all affectionately annoyed.

“I’ve been here before,” he says instead, a little distant, tracing his fingers over the stone. He circles the well, footsteps silent in the wet grass, face dipping in and out of dappled shadow from the tree cover above. “It was the same then, too. Listen.”

He chucks another stone in; she listens, nodding as the silence stretches. “Is it dry?”

“Maybe. Or it goes on forever.”

“Or it’s enchanted.”

“What?” he asks, snorting his incredulity. “Catching everything that’s tossed in? Could be a wrecking yard of rocks and coins and things down there.”

“Just hovering over the water,” and there’s amusement in her voice. “Though I cannot imagine why anyone would enchant a well to do _that_.”

“Some weird packrat of a magician maybe. Like those birds.”

“Magpies?”

“Mmm.”

“I don’t know. It still doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Trevor shifts, braces on the well’s rim, leaning in over the blackness. “Makes more sense than it actually being bottomless,” he says, voice hollowed out and swallowed up by the cold stone.

Silence for a moment, breathing in that same stale air he remembers, and he wonders how many other voices have disappeared into it, how many strangers’ words he’s tasting on the back of his own tongue. Then a warm orange light flickers off to the side.

“Do you want me to—?” Sypha asks, gesturing into the darkness with the contained little ball of flame and light she’s got hovering in her palm.

“No,” Trevor says, after a stretch. “I don’t— I don’t think I _want_ to know which it is.”

* *

An hour or so later, as the sun’s starting to work its melting, bleeding way under the horizon, Trevor again stops the horses. There’s imagery in his head—bottomless pits and icy stone in the wintertime and endless, hopeless falls, from grace or otherwise—that he’s been struggling to connect with something that makes sense. All at once, the pieces have come together, the answer standing out like a splash of sunlight across a darkened room.

Somewhere nearby, the rough, ugly call of an evening bird.

“So, ah. What do you think about going back to the castle?” he asks, tentative.

A sigh of relief from next to him, as if she’d been a hair’s breadth from saying it too and had been anticipating an argument. “We should. We don’t have any other destination at the moment, and I was beginning to feel aimless.”

“You’ve spent your life a nomad. Isn’t aimlessness part of that whole package?”

“Yes, but since all of this began, I’ve learned what it feels like to have direction,” she says, gesturing at the horizon. “To have _purpose_.”

That’s bullshit; she’s always had direction, he thinks, always had purpose. Always had a strong sense of what _has to be done_ , or else he wouldn’t have found her in the catacombs like he did. But maybe she just means knowing which way to point the wagon. “How’s it feel?”

“Good! But I am not the only one who needs purpose, and I think this is the direction we’ve been needing.”

“Sure,” he says, casual. “Just to… check on the state of things. It’s been a while. Make sure everything’s still secure.”

She laughs a little, knowingly, teasing. “Of course. That is clearly what you are most concerned with, Trevor Belmont.”

Shit. Whole name means she’s on to him. “It is!”

“Of course,” she repeats and then, mercifully, drops the subject.

* *

So they go back.

It’s a careful process, avoiding the village spread out below and all of its fucking horrible memories, tethering the horses up to a bit of old Belmont ruins. They pick their way over the wreckage of the castle’s entryway that has still not been cleared, and dodge around the largest bloodstains in the carpets that have still not been washed away, and don’t talk about just how worried they’re becoming with each step through this abandoned, desolate space.

“Maybe he did go back to sleep after all,” Trevor says, trying for disappointment but it sounds stupid and naive even to his own ears. He pauses at the base of the staircase, hand settling on the wood.

“Or maybe he has been working on the hold instead? It took a lot more structural damage than this place did,” Sypha suggests, and see, on her? Optimism works. It doesn’t sit like an ill-fitting coat on the frame of her voice, forced and false, like it does when he gives it a go. He can almost believe her.

But there’s a voice in his head, the same one that’s been with him for fifteen years with helpful reminders every time he dares to forget that _everyone he’s ever loved is dead_ , and it’s communing with all the old ghosts in this place to say that maybe, maybe something _else_ has happened. It’s a thought he tries to dodge but it’s like it’s made of thornweed, covered in sticky burrs, and the harder he struggles against it the more it snags and cuts him.

 _Maybe the villagers chased him out,_ it starts out, pretty benign. Survivable. _Pitchforks, torches—they like those here._

Then: _Maybe they did more than just chase him._

Then: _Maybe one of those rogue vampire Generals decided to come here and do away with the last bastion of humanity in their fucked-up, demented power structure._

_Maybe…_

He thinks about Alucard, standing on this very spot at the base of the stairs, eyes a hundred miles away as he called this place his grave, and Trevor had said _No_ but what does no mean, to a creature who’s never had to follow a command in his life? Hell, Trevor had told him to make something of the place too, and that clear as fuck hasn’t happened.

“This feels wrong,” Sypha says, toeing at a bloodstain that looks, in the light, like it’s fresher than the others. “I don’t like it.”

Trevor closes his eyes, takes a deep breath through his nose; the smell of old blood is overpowering. If the worst has happened, he thinks, if they find Alucard upstairs somewhere staked and bled out for weeks, he can only pray to whatever wrathful god still pays attention to him that there will be revenge to be had, someone to aim his fury at, someone whose blood he can spill in return—cleanse these walls with it, let it soak into the soles of his boots and know that justice has been done.

They climb the staircase in silence, dust motes floating thick in the sunlight streaming in through the unshuttered windows.

*


	2. Chapter 2

*

The place is still a maze, and Trevor would swear they’ve covered some of these hallways twice without ever circling back on their path; it’s like walking on the back of a snake that’s too busy eating itself to realize it’s got passengers, endlessly looping from nose to tail and back again. Still, despite the dizzying geometry, despite the identical furniture and carpets and artwork and _bloodstains,_ it doesn’t really feel like the same place they invaded early in the spring. It’s no mystery why: every single window in the place has had its shutters thrown open, and a lot of the ones above ground level have their glass opened too, letting air circulate and carry away the stench of demons and blood and battle that permeates the lower entryway. Sunlight falls in thick parallel stripes across the corridors, blazing white against all the black and red and grey like a declaration or a warning, and up here at least, it feels… airy. Pleasant, almost, if you ignore all the context.

“Well, none of those bastards are going to get to him during the day, at least,” Trevor drawls out, mostly to himself. “Not through that gauntlet.”

Other than the windows, though, not much seems to have been done over the past few months. There at least aren’t any birds nesting tucked up under the vaulted ceilings, which he’d figure would have happened if the place were truly unoccupied with the windows left open like that. Likewise, some of the hall carpets are less dusty than others, implying recent foot traffic, and he follows that trail as easily as fresh deer prints through the woods.

By the time they find him—sprawled in one of the sterile, unlived-in spare bedrooms, face buried in an armful of dark green bedsheet—Trevor’s mostly gotten his worry under control, because details matter and most of the details have been implying a present, if not particularly productive, inhabitant. It’s still a shattering kind of relief to see the proof of it; Alucard’s visibly breathing, the bedding is free of bloodstains, and judging by the faint, entertainingly undignified snoring, this is normal human-like sleep, not the deathless suspension they’d inadvertently kicked him out of under Greşit.

“Okay,” Sypha says, both of them drawn close. She sounds a little shaky still. “Okay. Better than the coffin, at least.”

Trevor runs his hand over his face, breathes. “Better than a lot of things. Kind of weird he hasn’t woken up, though, we’re not exactly being quiet. _Alucard,”_ he says sharply, clapping his hands once.

Alucard startles awake hard, mumbling a bunch of urgent nonsense in who-knows-what language, mouth full of fangs and eyes a little too red. He peers at them for a moment, getting his bearings and swallowing back the startled panic as Sypha sits down beside him. His eyes clear quickly, to no small relief. “Sypha? Belmont. Why are you here?”

And because he’s who he is, and is trying to forget the last few hours’ fear, Trevor smirks and says, “We fell down a hole.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” Alucard moans, running a hand over his face. “Not this again. I swear, Belmont, if you pull that whip on me I will truss you up in it like a Christmas goose.”

“Whoa there,” Trevor laughs.

“My goodness,” Sypha adds, leaning to playfully nudge at Alucard’s shoulder with her own. “You almost sound happy to see him for once.”

“Never,” Alucard grumbles, but there’s a hint of a reluctant grin through the curtain of his hair, a hint of fang.

Trevor, as suicidally reckless as ever, takes that as an invitation to plunk down on Alucard’s other side, lounging back on his hands. It’s a nice bed actually, really soft, kind of springy. He bounces on his hands a little, testing it.

“I really would,” Alucard continues, “like to know what brings you here. You’re not unwelcome, but if there’s some new disaster going on that you need my help with—”

“We just wanted to see how you were doing,” Sypha supplies.

“Yeah, make sure you’re doing a good enough job looking after everything,” Trevor adds; then, as Sypha somehow manages to kick him in the leg without so much as grazing Alucard: “ _Ow_ , fuck’s sake, Sypha. Fine. Annnd to make sure you haven’t sulked your way into a hole in the ground.”

“I appreciate the concern,” Alucard says after a moment, though it’s anyone’s guess as to whether he actually does; his voice is flatter than Trevor remembers, and there’s not much to read in it. “if not the exact phrasing, but I fail to see how that justifies the two of you invading my bed.”

“You are just full of innuendo today,” Sypha teases, but there’s a tension in her voice; he hasn’t answered the question. “Having interesting dreams when we woke you?”

A rushed, dismissive head-shake. “No. I don’t dream.”

“Yeah, you do,” Trevor says knowingly, head cocked to one side. He had a bruise on his flank for a _week_ after that night in the woods near Argeș to prove it. “But I don’t think you were. I don’t think—”

“—at all.”

“I don’t think,” Trevor continues, volume ticking up a bit, “I’ve ever seen anyone as dead-to-the-world as you just were.”

“You have no idea how soundly I slept under Greşit.”

“Yeah, but that was magical coffin sleep, wasn’t it? This was just like,” he waves a hand, encompassing the whole scene: the rumpled sheets, Alucard’s rumpled hair, the rumpled clothes he’s been sleeping in; Alucard himself, even now still rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Black out at 3 in the morning after _finally_ finding the wine cellar, working your way through half of it, and then making a serious attempt at spending the next three days sleeping it off.  You know. Normal sleep.”

Alucard looks at him with an expression halfway between horror and regret.

“ _No!”_ Sypha says, disbelieving. “You _didn’t.”_

“I didn’t,” Alucard grits out, turning to her. “I’m just appalled to realize that that’s what Belmont considers normal sleep.”

“Well—”

“ _And_ ,” he cuts Trevor off, “I’m not yet awake enough to process your inane ramblings in real time.”

“You can insult me for rambling if you want,” Trevor says, pointedly, suddenly serious. “I’m not the stupid half-vampire with delusions of invincibility who let two people creep up on him while he was sleeping. We could have killed you.”

Alucard runs a hand over his face. “And why would you do that? Foolish of me maybe, but I sort of thought we were past that stage.”

“Well, I mean. W _e_ wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be us—”

“You know what he means,” Sypha cuts in, worry giving her voice an edge of sharpness. “The castle is wide open, we could have been anyone.”

A distracted nod, hair failing more into his face. “Again, I appreciate the concern. But trust me when I say that I would have known the difference.” Another glint of fang. “And responded appropriately.”

Trevor figures he’s supposed to feel menaced right now, but eh, this all feels rehearsed. “What, in your sleep?” he scoffs.

“Yes, actually,” Alucard says, taking the opportunity to stand, extricating himself from between them. “You two are distinctive, and as much as I’m loathe to admit it, my subconscious has apparently decided that you’re… safe.”

“Safe, huh?” Trevor wants to believe that, despite his best efforts, and despite the fact that Alucard handles the word ‘safe’ like one might handle a seventeen-legged insect. But also: “That why you woke up a fangy horror?”

“Did I,” Alucard asks, sounding only vaguely interested in the answer. Now that he’s standing, looking around the room, looking away from them, there’s a wilted quality to him that reminds Trevor of an unwatered cornstalk.

“Truly,” Sypha says, reaching up to touch Alucard’s arm. “How _are_ you doing?”

For just a second, he leans into the touch, then straightens and turns back to them with a smile that is no smile at all; it looks like someone’s pinned the corners of his mouth up. “I’m… fine. Things are going well.”

“Really.” Trevor narrows his eyes; that’s the poorest excuse for a lie he’s ever heard, from man or monster alike.

The not-smile falters. “Why would I have said it, if I didn’t mean it?”

“I have no idea,” Trevor says, pushing himself up from the bed, “why anyone would say anything that’s so clearly, obviously a lie.”

Sypha’s brow pinches. “But you lie about that kind of thing all the time.”

Oh fucking hell. Of course he does, because he’s the rugged stoic one, he doesn’t _have to_ talk about his feelings. That’s just the way of things. “Fine. Right. I know _why_ you’d lie about it but. Don’t. Okay?”

Alucard just eyes him, accusation of hypocrisy clear as crystal on his face. It’d taken a while to learn how to sort out all the different kinds of disdain he was capable of expressing through the set of his mouth alone, and now that Trevor is back to deciphering it again, he finds he hasn’t lost his touch.

“Look,” he continues, scrubbing at his face. Give a little, get a little. “We just rode for a week to get here, to _see you_ , and we got here and the place is such a shambles we were sure something had happened to you, so just. Don’t lie to us.”

After a long moment of stalemate, Alucard wilts again, sighs. “I’m… tired, I suppose. A little hungry? It’s hard to say.”

Sypha runs her hand up his arm, resting on his shoulder. “When did you eat last?”

Alucard just makes an indecisive noise, less like he’s hiding something and more like he simply doesn’t know.

A sigh, disappointment and concern ringing through the sound. “Okay,” Sypha says, turning to steer Alucard out the door. “Breakfast.”

* *

This kitchen is the cozy one, the one his mother had insisted on having put in when she’d gotten tired of using the massive, majestic oak table in the luxurious grand hall to feed porridge to a squalling infant. Too much of an ordeal to clean up afterward, she’d said when recounting the story once, and Adrian had gone as red as he was capable of at the sheer embarrassment of it. She’d told him afterward though, that there was no shame in being undignified at certain ages; that was the way of the human world.

He wonders, habitually and without any real venom, what Belmont’s excuse is.

Once they’d taken in the state of the place—dusty countertops, torches broken, cobwebs in the corners, very little surviving except for dry goods—they’d sat him down at the table and had a little conference, lowering their voices in an entertaining bid to avoid his hearing. Adrian sets his chin on his arms and listens, regardless. Apparently, _Belmont_ of all people is being put in charge of the food, Sypha darting out to retrieve some things from the wagon—milk, butter, eggs. Something else he doesn’t catch. They must have found a town nearby, on their way here. It occurs to him that he probably should know if there is another town, besides the one spread out in the shadow of the castle down below.

Truth be told, he’s feeling a little dazed. He feels dazed a lot lately, which helps with bringing sleep on but not with much else, including processing the sudden reappearance of these two, with their high-strung patter and endearing demands for honesty. He’s missed them, or at least, he’s missed the sound of voices that aren’t his own. Footsteps that don’t sink gracefully and noiselessly into the carpets. Someone to keep an extra ear out, to tend the fire—  

No, he thinks, as Sypha returns to the kitchen with their foodstuffs and sets a warm hand on his shoulder, as Belmont accidentally upends the canister of flour and gets it all over himself and the counter in a laughable avalanche. No, he is fairly sure he missed them, specifically.

And Adrian honestly expects breakfast to consist of raw meat on sticks or something equally barbaric, but half an hour later, he’s watching Belmont wipe the last of that scattered flour from his face, the cooktable covered in sugar and bits of dough and more flour, a deep cast-iron pan of rolled dough resting in the oven. There’s a vaguely sweet, spicy smell in the air, magnified tenfold when Belmont starts heating a second pan with a sugary white-brown slurry coating its interior. It’s familiar, somehow, tugging at memory the way mystery odors sometimes do.

“I have to admit, I didn’t expect you to be so versed in cooking,” Adrian says, a bid to distract himself. The barb feels lazy even to him, but if they wanted him at his best then they ought not to have woken him after so little sleep. “Seems too civilized a skill for someone whose hobbies primarily include hitting monsters with sticks.”

“Yeah, I’m full of surprises,” Belmont says, with a twist of quiet self-deprecation; the strike doesn’t even land. If Adrian’s being honest with himself, he’s a little impressed. Sypha has been a good influence. “To be fair, you’ve only ever seen me sleeping in the dirt next to a campfire. Not exactly civilization.”

“I think,” Sypha says, “your family library counts as civilization.”

“His library,” Belmont corrects quietly, then, more loudly, “Also, believe it or not, _not a great place_ to start a cooking fire. Being a giant hole filled with paper and all.”

“What exactly _are_ you making?” Adrian finally asks, trying to temper the curiosity in his voice with detached annoyance.

Belmont shrugs, not turning. “Just a family recipe.”

“Full of garlic and holy water, then.”

Belmont barks a laugh. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d eat it just to prove you could. But no. Just a sort of traditional breakfast for special events. Holidays, big victories, uh, homecomings…”

That spice smell has been building up in the room, and it’s honestly lovely, and tickling at Adrian’s memory now with a persistence that’s becoming hard to ignore. “…and what is that I’m smelling?”

“That,” Sypha says proudly, swiping the tiny stone jar from Belmont’s elbow and handing it to Adrian with a flourish, “is _cinnamon._ ”

Hm. Interesting; he cracks open the jar to take a careful sniff of the contents. This close to the source, the memory finally clicks: a single winter holiday spent among the villagers of Târgoviște with his mother while his father was off travelling in the east. She’d changed him into simpler clothes, brushed his hair down over his ears and reminded him to keep his teeth in his mouth where they belonged, and sent him off into the group of children playing in the freshly fallen snow. He’d been predictably self-conscious at first, but the others didn’t single him out or make fun of his eyes or force him to posture for a place in their play, tugging him laughing down into the snow with them. And after, there’d been these delicately tiny cinnamon biscuits made by one of the wealthier merchant families, reserved strictly for the children. For a brief few moments there, his hair ruffled under a stranger’s hand and a warm treat in his grasp, shoes filled with snow and eyelashes dusted with ice and another child’s arm at his back—he’d felt acceptance, maybe even belonging.

He closes his eyes, takes another deep breath of the spice, then seals the jar back up. Peels himself out of the memory, because that does not matter now. “How on earth did you acquire this?”

“My people,” she says, still preening and prideful, and for good reason evidently, “do a lot of trading while they travel, especially on the eastern routes. Not to make money of course, just to carry pieces of the cultures they encounter with them. And they were very grateful for what the three of us did—risking our lives, fulfilling the prophecy, saving the world, all of that.” She waves her hand in a circle, comically dismissive. “They sent us back with some gifts—nothing _traditionally_ valuable, but—”

“Valuable enough,” Adrian says, handing the jar back. “Nearly worth its weight in gold last I checked.”

“Yeah,” Belmont chimes in, “But gold tastes like _shit_.”

“Which begs the question,” Adrian continues, ignoring him, “why you’re wasting something this precious on _Belmont’s_ cooking.”

“Hey now, I know what I’m doing.” He’s retrieved the pan from the oven, the dough risen now into puffy golden-brown rolls swirled with heat-darkened cinnamon, and is drooling the glaze from the other pan onto them. It looks positively decadent; Belmont looks insufferably self-satisfied. “The real question is why I’m wasting it on you, _vampire_.”

The pan hits the table unceremoniously, and Belmont slumps into a chair, prying one of the rolls out and taking a ravenous bite of the hot, sticky, spicy mess. Sypha follows suit, groaning in happiness after the first taste.

“Homecomings, hm?” Adrian mumbles.

“Mmf,” Trevor says around his mouthful, a hesitant affirmative. He gestures to the pan, expectant.

Adrian leans forward, extricates a roll delicately—lets the spiced smell permeate his senses before taking a bite, and for a fleeting moment, there it is again: _belonging_.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm really hungry now. I hope these three idiots appreciate the sacrifices I make for them.


	3. Chapter 3

*

That afternoon, they hole up in a corner of the castle that Alucard insists is free of traps and other nastiness, and compare notes.

“Look,” Trevor says, though he’s not actually looking at her. “I’m just saying: I know grief, and I know how to get away from it.”

“You know how to _run_ away from it, you mean.” Sypha’s leaning back against the cushion of a couch that is far too ornate; Trevor’s fine on the floor. “Which has not gotten you anywhere except perpetually where you started.”

“Sypha…” Trevor rubs his face with both hands, drowning his voice.

“I know,” she says, an attempt at soothing. “I know you lost a lot, and you were very young. And I know that you survived that, and kept enough of yourself to still care about saving a stranger’s grandchild, to care about saving everyone you could. But you still have nightmares. You still flinch from fire, when you aren’t expecting it. You have never left that house, not really.”

She’s not right. She isn’t. Because if she is, then he’s wasted more years than is forgivable. “Why is this suddenly about me?”

“It isn’t. It’s about you understanding that what you did, didn’t work. And it won’t work for him, either. He has to face these things, Trevor. Work through them.”

“What, have a good cry?”

Sypha’s eyebrows dip angrily. “Don’t you pull that ‘I’m too tough for crying’ crap on me, Trevor Belmont.”

“I’m… not, actually.” He rolls his face to the ceiling, scratches under his chin. “I’ve been in some really dark places, Sypha. Men who boast that they’ve never cried? They’re not leading challenging enough lives.”

A long, careful pause. There’s a noise from somewhere else in the castle, a strange thump-crash, followed by a whirr. Six hours back and they’re already learning to ignore that kind of nonsense.

“For the record,” Sypha says, tone level. “I know grief as well as you do.”

Trevor breathes out harshly through his nose. Sypha, who was being raised by her grandfather. Sypha, who has a talent that’s just got to run in families, and which the church would happily call devilry and do their best to stamp out, when and if they find it.

Sypha, who openly used that talent in front of a mob already baying for blood, putting herself in grave danger and doing it without a second thought, rather than let that mob get what they wanted.

“I know you do,” he says.

“Maybe he just needs something to _punch_ ,” she says, voice a little distant. “That always helped me.”

Huh. “You _punched_ things. With your fists?”

“No, _I_ set things on fire, but that is not an option in this case.”

“I don’t know if punching things is either. He could barely stand up this morning.” Trevor leans forward, chin in his hand. “Do you think he’s been eating?”

“He said he hasn’t been.”

“No,” Trevor says, taking a breath, diving in before he loses his nerve. “Do you think he’s been _eating_.”

A stretch of silence, then a rustle of fabric as she sits up straighter. “He told us that he doesn’t need that.”

“Of course he fucking does.” Trevor picks at a loose thread in the carpet, then picks at a bit of lint on his knee; anything to avoid looking at Sypha. “Even if it’s just from animals. He probably said that so we wouldn’t spend the whole night awake, guarding our necks. But it’s not like dhampirs aren’t in the bestiary, and I know that thing inside and out. Trust me on this.”

“…then no,” she says after a moment’s consideration. “I don’t think he has been.”

“Christ,” Trevor says, shaking his head, looking up finally to meet Sypha’s gaze. “We shouldn’t have left him here.”

“And we can’t leave him here now, either,” she says, and like that, the decision is made.

* *

They go out to the hold before the light is gone, on Alucard’s request.

“I have a feeling,” he says, leading them out to where the blasted out rubble surrounds an even deeper blasted out hole; or did, when they’d left. “that the grounds surrounding the stone were warded as well, or it would have been trivial for anyone to just pull up the floor around it and get in that way.”

“Oh, it definitely was,” Sypha answers before Trevor can even formulate a response, which would have been something along the lines of _I have no fucking idea_. “I could feel it while I was opening the door, this sort of dense… I don’t know. That feeling you get trying to walk through water? Everything feels slow and heavy. It was like that, all around it.”

“Hm. Interference?”

“Maybe…”

Trevor tunes them out, focuses up ahead because… huh. There’s a new stone. And new stonework all around it, the massive hole filled in with an irregular, artistic arrangement of rectangular and square stone slabs that are just different enough in color from the old stone to pick out the borders of the new work. But it’s been masterfully done, and must have taken a serious time investment.

“This is what you’ve been wasting your time on?” he blurts out, before he can think better of it. “Instead of working on the castle?”

Silence behind him. When he turns, they’re both staring at him, Sypha annoyed, Alucard still just unsettlingly blank, with a hint of hurt around the edges.

Well, shit. He hadn’t thought he was being _that_ mean about it; it’s possible that Sypha had been onto something, back in Greşit.

“Would you rather I had let the spring rains get in?” Alucard finally replies, prickly. “You left this place in my care. The castle is a disaster but it’s tight against the weather. It could wait. This could not.”

“Some wood and oiled canvas could have taken care of that,” Trevor says, turning away again to walk toward the stone door. The slabs ring crisply under his boots, all the seams perfect. He’s impressed, hopes that it finds its way into his voice. “This looks like it took a lot of work.”

A harsh sigh, then steps picking up behind him. “There was also the matter of the intruder that… focused my plans.”

Trevor freezes; he feels the air sucked out of his lungs, cold oil in his veins. “What?” he wheezes, turning wide eyes back on Alucard. “Someone _got in_?”

Alucard sighs again, walks past him to gaze down at the slab over the entrance. “The day the two of you left. Obviously this was still just a hole in the ground, though we had at least locked the inner doors. When I came back here to do something about that, I heard the heartbeat of someone fleeing the area. Frantically. And there was a rope dropped down from the edge of the hole.”

Fuck. Fucking _shit_. His family’s legacy, everything they’d worked so hard to collect and catalog and preserve for future generations, _literally all that was left of them_. Pried open by some fucking _grave-robber_ , probably someone from the town below, someone who _knew_ what was here and just needed an opening to make a grab for it, and…

“Shit,” is all he says aloud, pressing his eyes closed. “God _damn_ it, Alucard…”

“That’s not fair,” Sypha cuts in sharply. “It wasn’t his fault.”

Trevor groans, gets twin fistfuls of his own hair, yanks hard. “I know, okay? I _know_. Agghhhh!” He kicks at the cover stone hard, doesn’t even feel the pain of it. “I’m not actually _blaming_ him, I just… this is kind of a big fucking deal, Sypha!”

They don’t respond. He closes his eyes, takes a few more breaths. His toes start to throb; he wonders if he’s broken them.

“Okay. Okay.” Trevor works to get his breathing under control, to get his vision to stop wobbling drunkenly back and forth. “It’s not your fault,” he says again, scrubbing his palms over his eyes, unsure who he’s trying to convince.

“Regardless, I am sorry,” Alucard says, quiet, an odd vulnerability in his voice that makes Trevor want to flinch away. “It was technically under my care at that point. And so, I technically did fail you.”

Dropping his hands back to his sides, Trevor sighs. Losing your shit in front of the only people on earth you respect? Not great. “Whatever. Technically. I’m not blaming you, so blame yourself if you want, but you’re doing it alone. How bad is it?”

Adrian considers, staring down at the stone as if he can see through it. “The inner door was unsealed, but also undamaged. I wasn’t able to tell if anything had been taken.”

“Of course not. We left it in a pretty awful state,” Trevor says, considering the stone. “But nothing looked different?”

“Even the demonic bloodstains were exactly as you left them.”

“And in all fairness, Trevor,” Sypha says, pressing close behind him. “ _You_ don’t even know the contents of the place that well.”

“Right,” he says, feeling his tone getting away from him. “So we won’t even _know_ what kind of awful surprise someone’s going to use against us.” He looks up at Alucard, also drawn up surprisingly close, suddenly unable to deal with his stillness. “You should be more worried about this than I am. There are things down there…”

“I know. But there’s little to be done now except keep our guard up.”

“Fine.” It isn’t, but whatever. He puts it away. “How do we get this up?”

“Is it warded yet?” Sypha asks. “The runes look exactly the same.”

“No. Just heavy, at the moment. I was waiting for your help with that—there were enough fragments around to reconstruct the words, but this sort of magic isn’t really in my wheelhouse.”

“What,” Trevor asks, “the magical dark death door magic doesn’t involve enough bloodletting for you?”

Sypha shoots him a glare, but this time his bullshit has been well timed—Alucard actually laughs, a low, light, sharp sound threaded through with a shadowy edge, like torchlight glinting off of a blade. All things considered, one of the best things he’s heard in a while.

“It might at that,” Alucard says, as his laughter trails off. “Probably yours.”

“Probably both of you,” Sypha corrects, “if you both want to be able to open it without dragging me out here every time.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Not bad enough that he’s going to have to be personally involved in his family’s secret dark magic fetish, is it? Trevor groans theatrically.

Alucard, on the other hand, grins. With fang. “What a lovely ritual that sounds like. We’ll be like blood brothers, Belmont.”

“Oh my god, fuck you.”

“Is that any way to talk to your brother?” Sypha asks, covering her mouth with her hand to hold in her laughter.

“Just _move the fucking stone,_ ” Trevor grits out, pointing down at the thing, trying his damnedest to not give into the same laughter—bubbling up from someplace warm and desperate, where all of his worst ideas come from.

* *

“That’s… what is that?”

“Not sure why you’re asking me,” Trevor complains. “My whole world right now is this ugly fucking tapestry.”

“It’s…a dog?" Sypha clarifies, uncertain. "That is dead. But walking around?”

Trevor chews on that for a second, narrows his eyes when it fails to resolve into anything that makes sense. “What?”

“Look for yourself.”

He sighs long-sufferingly, starts descending the ladder he’s rigged up to get to the worst of the damage in this side hallway. He’s pretty sure _this_ mess isn’t their fault; there seemed to have been some kind of weird coup going on already when they’d gotten here, and how exactly do you get blood twenty feet straight up a fucking wall, anyway?

He gets his feet on the ground, turns to where Sypha’s gesturing, and… okay, yeah. It looks like a dog, dark little puglike face whining up at them. Acts like a dog, bouncing on its front paws. Is missing a large portion of that face, though, and most of one of those legs. Doesn’t seem bothered by it, which Trevor isn’t going to begrudge him, though he does wonder at his own lack of reaction; if an extremely friendly, excitable living dead dog doesn’t even nudge up against his ‘too weird’ boundaries, maybe he needs to readjust his perspective.

“Hey,” he says, taking a careful step closer. Cleaning duty or not, he’s still got his whip at hand, and if this thing decides to be a ravening demon in disguise, he’d rather find out sooner than later. “What’s going on, little guy? Looking for someone to play with, or looking for someone to _eat?_ ”

“I think he belonged to one of my father’s forgemasters,” Alucard says, appearing from around a dark corner as if summoned by their confusion. He has a stack of fresh cleaning cloths in hand, and a new bucket of water. “He had a few other creatures, but I believe they all left the castle of their own volition once the forges were shut down. Except for this one.”

“And you’ve been taking care of him?” Sypha asks, crouching down to offer the dog her fingers to sniff. Trevor is half a breath away from snatching her hand back, but then she’s being licked and, okay, the weird dead dog does seem pretty harmless.

Alucard shrugs. “What is there to take care of? He’s attached to the place so I tolerate him, but he’s been reanimated by dark magic; it’s not as though he needs to be fed or taken on walks.”

“I bet he would _like_ to go on walks though, wouldn’t you?” Sypha coos, scratching the thing under its chin; she’s obviously smitten.

God damn it. Okay. “Does he have a name?”

“I have no idea. I never met the man; my father didn’t bring him to the court until I was already under Greşit.”

“All right, then,” Trevor says, crouching down with a smirk, pointing at the excited ball of dark fur and death and exposed bones that somehow manages to still be a _dog_. “In the hallowed tradition of my people, I dub thee Shitbutt.”

* *

Only Trevor calls him Shitbutt. Sypha and Alucard settle on Lazarus, the casual heresy entertaining to them both. Lazar for short.

He’s a good dog.

* *

“Here’s the problem,” Trevor says, the whip unfurled and in front of him on the table; he’s checking it over meticulously for cracks or drying, like he does every few months. Nothing survives hundreds of years without upkeep. “That town down there? Is full of the people that burned me out of my home and killed my family. Which means that if _I_ go to buy us more eggs and butter and all the seeds Sypha wants, I will probably murder someone. Or multiple someones.”

He looks up, seeking Alucard’s gaze. He knows this is coming off as flippant, has to depend on the other man’s perceptiveness to realize that it _really, really_ isn’t.

“Which would be an impediment to us acquiring the eggs and butter,” Alucard finishes for him, one corner of his mouth turning up slightly.

“And the seeds, yeah.”

“Can’t forget those,” Alucard teases.

“If I did, Sypha would murder me.”

Alucard sits back in the chair, eyes Trevor across the expanse of the kitchen table, covered as it in in the refuse of breakfast. Eggs, this time, which is why they need more of them. “It seems like there’s a lot of murder going around in this castle, lately,” he deadpans. “Have you noticed?”

Trevor shouldn’t laugh, he shouldn’t. He’s talking about the crazy assholes in the village and all the history he’s tried to leave behind, and the whip in his fingers has seen so much blood since that day fifteen years ago, and nothing about this is funny.

He laughs anyway, snatching up a corner of toast and throwing it at Alucard with more force than strictly necessary.

“Oh no,” Alucard says, tone impossibly bored as he pulls the projectile out of his hair; a swath of it stays clumped together, sticky. “Currant jam, my only weakness.”

* *

So they send Sypha instead, her robes rearranged to be as nondescript as possible; as long as it doesn’t scream _Speaker_ in capital letters, she should be fine. Alucard offers to go in her stead, but Trevor wisely points out that they are trying to _avoid_ being burned out of this home too, and that the people are probably understandably skittish of anything with fangs after a huge, spooky castle materialized in the middle of their skyline, looming over the town like a predatory creature out for blood.

The blazing red moon, bleeding hatred and grief into the night, probably had not helped.

* *

So Sypha gets her seeds, and she spends two days straight ripping up the ground outside the castle, turning it over, softening it up. The plot she’s working on abuts against a patch of white lilies and morning glories and tiny, tiny violets, velvety petals deep with the most royal of purples. Trevor’s pretty sure they’re left over from the estate garden, the one his mother tended even if she could have had a servant do it; there’s something in the colors and the mingled smell of them that feels incredibly familiar, and plants do go wild if you let them.

She plants carrots, and onions, and starchy things like turnips and parsnips, and greens that the rabbits will eat before she ever gets to them, and she plants flowers—all around the food plants in a ring. Not that any of that is visible now; it just looks like so much black dirt to Trevor, but Sypha is excited, wearing a broad-brimmed sun hat, soil streaked on her face and caked under her fingernails.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have had much experience gardening,” Alucard says, looking over the newly planted patch. His eyes keep wandering, noticeably, to the riot of flowers growing beyond it. “Being a nomad and all.”

“I didn’t!” she says, nothing but joy in her voice. “But it is something I’ve always wanted to learn, and now I can. Will you help me?” She looks at both of them, beseeching.

Trevor throws his hands up. “Hey, now, I tried this once? Everything I touched died. Withered black and snarly right before my eyes.”

She rolls her eyes, looks to Alucard.

It takes a moment for him to register that the focus has moved to him, looking up from the flowers. He considers, then reaches out and gently snatches the hat off of her head, sets it on his own. He looks _ridiculous_. “Just tell me what to do, Miss Sypha.”

They move the earth together, the two of them, and Trevor watches with a wonder that grows broader and deeper every day.

* *

In a rare show of forethought, or possibly self-preservation, Trevor _asks_ if Alucard would like his old bedroom cleaned out or left as-is; Alucard says that he doesn’t particularly care. He’s never going in there again anyway.

Trevor cleans it. He gets rid of the broken mirror and the scorched carpet and the shattered bits of wood everywhere, sweeps up the soot and ash—tries not to think too hard about that—but he isn’t sure what to do with the ring, isn’t sure he even wants to touch it, lying there in a jagged circle of sunlight pouring in through the broken window. When he does finally bend to pick it up, he’s expecting it to burn him or jolt him or somehow exact some minor, petty revenge on him from beyond the veil of death, but it’s just ordinary metal, slightly warm from the sun, heavy in his hand. It clatters when he drops it to the little chest of drawers against the far wall, the one under that strangely ordinary looking family portrait. After a moment, he adds one of the small toys that had been knocked to the floor in the fight; an impulsive, maybe presumptuous gesture, but if this room is to be a monument to anything, he figures, it should be a monument to the happiness this family had, for however short a time. The fact that he doesn’t understand it isn’t the point.

When he pops his head in the next day—Alucard has vanished again and Trevor has no idea where he goes when he does this, is checking all the emotional thornbushes he can think of that the man might have gotten tangled in—he’s surprised to see a little pot of white lilies on the chest as well, freshly dug from the garden outside. The petals brush against the gold-leaf of the portrait’s frame, leaves arching protectively over the stuffed toy and the ring, a single point of life in this space so eclipsed by death.

* *

In the end, he finds Alucard in the melted-down engine room, ruined gears under his hands and soil under his fingernails and a scream between his teeth.

* *

They decide, belatedly Trevor thinks, to put aside all of the small individual projects and finally attack the main hall. It keeps them busy, keeps them all in sight of one another, keeps any of them from going too far down any dark paths. Nothing all that traumatizing happened here, Trevor figures. This was where they were stunningly victorious, where they had felt invincible, where they had moved as one—an unstoppable whirlwind creature of pure justice and wrongs righted, beating with three hearts.

No emotionally messy confrontations. No moral dilemmas. A whole lot of blood and death, sure, but that had been nothing new, by that point. The best kind of distraction, and Trevor should know; he’s the grand champion of avoidance.

Then, of course, fucking Alucard asks about fucking Braila.

Trevor is sitting cross-legged on the carpet, scrubbing at one of the many bloodstains that probably won’t ever come completely out. Sypha is nearby, casting light wards on the newly opened windows one at a time, to let air move through but no solid objects. It doesn’t stink in here as much as it used to, which is a pretty solid accomplishment.

But. Braila.

“We went there,” Trevor says, scowling. “And then we left.”

“That’s all?”

“That,” Sypha says, wandering over to join them, “was its own challenge. We barely made it out alive.”

Alucard’s eyes widen in alarm that he’s not bothering to hide. He lowers himself to the floor, across the stain from Trevor. “I didn’t realize things had been so treacherous for you both.”

“Well, Braila’s normally a nice little riverside town, you know?” Trevor says, giving the spot an angry scrub. “Pretty hospitable even to the likes of washed up drunks like me.”

“But…?”

“That was before the insane vampire bitch-queen turned the place upside-down. Creative, that Carmilla. Really good at making you feel like a complete piece of shit, right before she murders you horribly.”

Alucard has gone still, eyes flashing. “Carmilla.”

“Do you know of her?” Sypha asks.

“She was the one who moved against my father, the night we attacked the castle. I don’t know much more, but she is… a serious threat, if she still lives.”

“Yeah, well, maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t. But if she’s alive, she’s running scared.”

A raised eyebrow. “Did you two…?”

Trevor laughs, and even he can hear how desperate it sounds.

“No,” Sypha says, sitting to join them. “Though not for lack of intent. She had a human with her, obviously a prisoner. I don’t know who he was or why she was keeping him,” and the frustration is clear in her voice; how can she tell this story into her people’s history _correctly_ without important details like those? But it had been a little difficult to keep up with current events while they were _locked up and waiting to die._ “He stirred up some sort of rebellion, among the people of the town; they were not yet inured to the horrors the other cities have faced. Their spirits were not broken.”

“They were going to send her up with the morning mist, but we didn’t see it happen.” Trevor concludes. “We slipped out in the chaos. Only reason we got out of that dungeon with our lives.”

Silence for a long moment. Trevor glares at the stain with the weight of personal vendetta.

Alucard pushes himself to his feet, expression locked down. He takes a few steps away, turns back, looks at them again. Opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out.

“Hey, look,” Trevor tries.

Alucard just shakes his head like he’s shaking off a nightmare, then crosses the floor and is out the front door without looking back.

* *

The next morning, bright and early before the day can heat up, Trevor finds himself itching for a fight. Maybe it’s his warrior instincts, telling him to not let his skills grow rusty while he spends all his time scrubbing gore from walls. Maybe it’s because he’d been forced to talk about fucking Carmilla yesterday and it’s left him wanting to hit things. Lots of things.

So he wakes up Sypha and they both hike over to the courtyard of the old estate. It’s where he used to train, back when the buildings weren’t just crumbling shells, and it’s the only area he knows of that’s big enough for this. The ground is more uneven than he remembers, patchy with scrubby wild grass, and the armory is caved in, all of its martial treasures long since looted. The whole space feels haunted.

Good a place as any, for fighting ghosts.

“All right,” he says, slipping his hand down to the handle of his whip. He’s more precise with it than any other weapon, can more easily pull punches and avoid real damage. “Like always. No lethal attacks, no setting the scenery on fire.”

She nods curtly, hands already dancing with blue and gold.

And they’re just getting started—she throws a cluster of ice shards at him that he has to take out one by one with the whip, leaving him precious little time to dodge the fireball she sends right up the middle and then come up swinging, aiming an entangling shot for her legs—when they both sense another presence, and pause.

Alucard walks up to the edge of the combat field, graceful and silent as always, that beautiful sliver of a sword already in hand. He flips a salute with it, then waits in silence.

“You want to have a go with one of us?” Trevor calls, then feels his ears warm as he realizes that that was not _precisely_ what he meant to say.

If Alucard recognizes that, though, he doesn’t show it. The dhampir lowers his face, eyes glittering with a quiet menace that Trevor hasn’t seen since Greşit. “No; I want to be pushed,” he says, voice low. “I’ll take you both.”

* *

They go for over an hour, forcing each other through some of the most demanding, honestly spectacular fighting Trevor thinks he’s ever seen from any of them. Sypha’s magic is definitely improving in both its complexity and its precision, and Alucard proves himself more capable than Trevor realized of defending against things that are not swords, not through brute force or sneaky vampire tricks, but just through straight-up technique.

Now, the grounds are scorched and ripped up and the day is getting hot. They’ve taken refuge in the shade of one of the crumbling stone archways, collapsed against one another like a three-pole tent, back to back and shoulder to shoulder—propping each other up. Trevor and Sypha are overheated, Alucard drooping from all the sun, and they’re all breathing hard, coming down from the adrenaline. Trevor has a burned spot in his hair and a shallow slash across the front of his shirt—not his good tunic, thankfully—and Sypha caught a small cut on her arm, but these are the risks you take sparring with live steel.

“I could have lost you,” Alucard says out of nowhere, barely above a whisper. Trevor can hear him turning the sword in his hands, point driven into the earth somewhere in front of him. “Both of you.”

Trevor reaches up, touches the gash in his shirt, the shallow stinging line of red beneath it. “It’s not _that_ deep.”

“No, not—In Braila.” His voice sounds like it belongs in a dream, disconnected in some indescribable way from the other sounds around them. “You could have died there.”

“We could have died anywhere. This isn’t exactly a safe, cozy world right now.”

“You could have died there and I never would have known. You would have just… never returned. Because I wasn’t there.”

Trevor doesn’t say anything, just sort of rolls his head back against Alucard’s shoulder with a sigh. Bastard, laying on the guilt like this, as if the thought of that—Alucard thinking they had abandoned him and never knowing the truth—hadn’t been what got them through the hardest moments.

“It… wasn’t quite as dramatic as Trevor made it sound,” Sypha says, and he can’t see it, staring as he is straight up into the brilliant blue sky, but he can hear the glare in her tone. “We just had bad timing, and caught the whole affair sort of sidelong.”

“She had you in her grasp, though.”

“Yeah, for a bit,” Trevor drawls. “But I don’t think she ever figured out what she had. Not before the people of Braila came for her.”

“If she had…” Alucard trails off at his own implications, his posture stiffening against them. There’s a chilly anger in his voice, cutting like Sypha’s ice. “And you didn’t even _tell me_.”

“…it was months ago,” Sypha says after an awkward moment, tone bitterly apologetic. “And by the time we got here we had other worries.”

“…’Other worries’.”

“Yes, like _you_ ,” she says, maybe a little too sharp.

That’s enough to silence Alucard, and no one speaks for a while after that, just listening to the gritty noise of Alucard’s sword point turning in the coarse soil, the distant bird noises, the buzzing song of cicadas in the nearby forest.

“I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says finally, near a whisper. “But I still wish you’d told me.”

 Sypha tips her head back against them both. “I’m sorry.”

“We weren’t keeping it from you,” Trevor adds; this isn’t just on Sypha. “Not on purpose.”

Hesitation, then a sigh, a single nod. Over the next few breaths, Alucard’s body goes gradually lax against them again. There’s something freeing, Trevor thinks, about not having to actually look anyone in the eye while saying these things. He pulls a few strands of grass, rubs them between his fingers until they disintegrate. He thinks he might be a coward after all.

“I dreamed it.” Alucard’s voice is still quiet, but more steady now, with a crushing inevitability to it; he sounds like the distant rumble of a coming storm. “Last night. I dreamed all the worst possibilities my mind could come up with. I dreamed your deaths.”

 _But you said you don’t dream_ , is on the tip of Trevor’s tongue, but fuck—they all already know that was a lie, and now is not the moment. “You know, we’re pretty tough, Sypha and me.”

“You certainly have proved that, many times over,” Alucard says flatly. Unconvinced. “It’s not always enough.”

“I mean it. We’re not going to just lay down and die for some toothy madwoman. Not after what we accomplished here. Right, Sypha?”

“If she had not been undone by her own tyranny,” Sypha proclaims, a little out of breath still, “I would have set her head on fire.”

A few breathless chuckles all around at that, nothing whole-hearted but it’s fine. They trail off into contemplative silence, a silence that stretches.

Sypha breaks it, cautious of the sharp edges. “Do you ever dream about—”

“Of course I do,” Alucard cuts her off. He probably doesn’t want to hear it out loud any more than Sypha wants to say it. “But those are different. The pain is in the waking, not in the dreaming.”

Fuck. Trevor’s had those, too—everyone survives the fire and everything is wonderful, and he thinks to himself that even though this has always been a dream before, this time, _this time_ , it must be real. Then of course it fucking isn’t. He swallows tightly and takes a chance, reaching over to snag Alucard’s wrist in his hand, squeezing gently. To his utter shock, the hand twists back in his grip, fingers settling into fingers, holding on. From the rustling sound of fabric, he can only suppose Sypha has done the same. There’s a grounding in it, like plunging your hand into ice water and finding the courage to keep it there.

“I don’t think,” Alucard says, voice so brittle but still not breaking, like a breeze whispering through a field of dead wheat, “that any human language exists, that has words for this.”

The sun climbs. They stay like that for a long time, the soldier and his hunter, his scholar, shoring him up, being his lifelines, reminding him that there are yet hearts in this world that he cares about—and that are still beating, against all odds.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this one; it was a big one, and necessarily sort of disconnected, so it took some time to iron out.
> 
> Also, I played a little fast and loose with the timeline at the end of S2, particularly in terms of Carmilla's occupation of Braila vs. immediately returning to Styria. I did it for the sake of the feels. Sorry!


	4. Chapter 4

*

By silent agreement, they begin to work on damage control. Security. If Carmilla really has been routed at Braila, her forces scattered and decimated, her resources depleted in a mad dash for her life—assuming she survived the revolt at all—she will not likely become a concern again for a while. But she is far from the only enemy Adrian has inherited from his father.

All the castle windows are getting warded, not just the ground level ones, a slow and tedious process. Adrian is painstakingly working to repair the two distance mirrors they have access to, one sliver of glass at a time. He cuts himself on the razor edge of a shard once, a fat drop of blood hitting the floor of his father’s study before the laceration can close itself, and for a few minutes, it’s like he’s forgotten how to breathe.

It passes. He doesn’t talk about it.

He’s also taken to patrolling the grounds at dusk and dawn, and dropping in on the hold once a day to be sure its security is holding. Sypha finally got around to reestablishing the wards on it, and Belmont still has the scabby little line across his palm to prove it, but their story and the dreams it sparked have him feeling antsy and nervous, like there is a catastrophe right around the next corner that, seemingly, only he can sense.

But: could he even handle trouble, if he were to find it? He feels physically much improved since they’ve been forcing him to take meals with them, more ready for a real fight than he’s been in months. But there’s a violent disequilibrium that hits him at random moments, and he feels slow and earthbound like he never has before, and that has him worried over his ability to protect his home, his companions. Maddeningly, he knows what the problem is, but like a starving fox that dies ten paces from a chicken coop, he just can’t find the energy to do anything about it. He’s been running close to the edge, in a lot of ways.

When he enters the hold today—he’s rigged up one of the sparking cast-iron lifts from the castle to serve in place of the grand staircase, at least for now—there’s a subtly different smell in the air: fresh pine, the pitch-tar odor of the sap still lingering, nothing like the aged oak and walnut that makes up most of the shelving and structure down here. He follows his nose all the way to the row of grotesque display cases along the back wall, hackles rising involuntarily as he works out where he’s headed. He almost abandons his own curiosity, then—he never enjoys this end of the vault, but today he is particularly Not In The Mood—when he hears a shuffle of movement, the dull clunk-thunk of what sounds like bone on bone.

Anger flares, blood licking at the edges of his vision. If some petty grave robber has gotten in here again, is _further desecrating—_

But no. He catches the hunter’s scent before he even makes the corner, oiled leather and sweat and that strange touch of spice, layered in with the wood smell he’s already noticed. There’s a square box on the floor next to the glass case, maybe a foot and a half on each side, plain pine, a fair imitation of dignified scrollwork tooled roughly into its sides and hinged top. It’s open, space inside taken up by a carefully, almost respectfully arranged pile of skulls. The display case itself is nearly empty; Belmont is crouched down in front of it, retrieving the last of the horrifying trophies, and he clearly hasn’t detected Adrian’s approach.

The anger dissipates; mischievy crawls in to replace it. He takes a few silent steps forward, drops down onto his heels, peering at Belmont in reflection in the empty expanse of glass backing the cabinet, framing his face over the arc of the skull’s brow even as the hunter reaches for it.

“ _Gah!_ ” Belmont shouts, jumping backward and just about out of his own skin. He fumbles the tiny skull, recovers his grip at the expense of his own balance, hitting the stone floor hard and barely missing bowling back into Adrian. “Oh my God, you sneaky piss-eyed _bastard_.”

“Well, that’s rude,” Adrian says, bemused. He stands fluidly, offering a hand up.

“Been called worse,” Belmont grunts, then to Adrian’s faint shock, he actually accepts the help, cradling the skull against his chest with the other hand as he rises. “By you, mostly.”

“And what was it you were telling me, about lowering one’s guard? Something to do with delusions of immortality.”

“Yeah, well,” Belmont says, turning toward the box. “I wouldn’t have to worry about my ‘mortality’ if I didn’t have you around trying to actually, literally kill me—in my childhood home, no less—"

He cuts off as Adrian’s hand moves of its own accord, wraps around his wrist before he can set the skull into the box. His other hand reaches out to trace the shape of it, the compact child’s braincase, the underdeveloped canines. It’s one thing to see it through glass, quite another to acknowledge its reality under his fingers.

“I know,” Belmont says after a long moment, quiet. Deflated. “Could’ve been you. Probably would have been, if the church hadn’t had their way with my family.”

A breath, deeper than it needs to be; Adrian feels vaguely shaken, in the same way as finding his hair clipped close in the aftermath of a swordfight—there but for the grace. Would _this_ Belmont have gone along on that hunt? Is that how the intersection of their paths in this world would have begun and ended? Would his father have lost his mind for his son the same as he had after Târgoviște, or was that sort of mad, heedless love reserved only for the brilliant and courageous woman who had stormed into his life all those years ago?

How did Belmont’s ancestors, Belmont who despite his boozing and veneer of apathy has an impressively strong moral compass, ever justify to themselves the murder of children?

They’re unanswerable questions. They’re un _askable_ questions.

He releases Belmont’s wrist, watches as the hunter’s big, world-roughened hands set the skull into the box with a delicacy he wouldn’t have thought possible.

“You, Belmont,” he says, forcing composure, ignoring how his voice wavers. Ignoring how that gentleness makes something warm flutter against his ribs. “Continue to have absolutely no filter. Or just an astonishing lack of tact.”

The other man shrugs, closing the box, subdued. “Never found much use for it. Blunt honesty gets me what I need.”

“I would argue that it gets you punched in the face more often than not.”

“And _then_ ,” Belmont says, producing a shovel from where it had been leaning against the case behind him. “I know that that’s a person who’d punch one of the heroes of Wallachia in the face. That’s good information to have. Here, carry this?”

Taking the shovel, Adrian narrows his eyes. “What am I digging?”

Belmont shakes his head, hefts the box up from the floor. “Nothing. That’s my job. Just makes it easier to carry this if—oh.” He looks unsure for a fleeting second, then it’s shuttered away again, behind the usual bluster. “I guess I should ask _you_. If there’s some _weird vampire thing_ you want done, instead of burying them?”

Adrian feels his mouth fall open, just a bit, all at once overwhelmed as it hits him what’s happening here. He’d… he’d thought that Belmont was simply putting them _away_ somewhere, where Adrian wouldn’t have to stare at them every time he came here. That was kindness enough, and unexpected.

“Don’t get me wrong, more than willing to give them a spot out there, but I don’t know what you people do, with—”

“With our dead?” Adrian sighs, dropping his eyes for a moment, thinking, digging through memory. It doesn’t come up often, but he can remember a servant of the castle who had been killed by a wandering, amateur hunter a decade or more ago. His father had treated the corpse with dismissive disdain: a shell, a used-up piece of detritus, proof that the soul inhabiting it hadn’t been fit enough to survive. A failure, due no particular ceremony.

His mother had been upset by it, he remembers now, and his father baffled by her reaction. Humans have always had more regard than that, honoring what’s left behind—paying respect to the hands that touched and the eyes that took in all the wonders of the world, the mouth that laughed, the ankle that twisted in dance, the body that sang with blood and wailed with fear and ran for its life and made that life worth living. Prey things; but then, anyone can become prey, and it’s fitting to feed either the worms or the fire, when there’s no more running to be done.

Adrian shakes his head, coming back up from the depths with a trace of a smile that he can feel despite himself. He settles the shovel over his shoulder. “No, there’s nothing special. This will be fine.”

* *

So they walk out to the Belmont family cemetery connected to the estate grounds, one of the few places even the church wouldn’t deface, all those years ago. It’s deceptively pleasant in the summer sunlight, untamed wild grasses rolling in waves and troughs between and around the headstones, rippling in the breeze like a massive school of blue-green fish. They settle in the far corner, Belmont digging away gamely, Adrian sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the box, tucked up under the sparse shelter of a tree. He’s slung one arm up on the box, pretending at a casual lean, actually feeling somewhat protective.

“Is there any way to find out who they were?” Belmont asks, conversational, when he’s cleared the three foot mark. The heat is oppressive, and he’s discarded his tunic, is flushed with sweat between all the scars, heart pounding in that overpowering, too-heavy way it has when he’s doing something demanding. A kettledrum-beat, too loud in Adrian’s ears.

“Are you suggesting I might be able to touch the remains and, like an oracle, mystically divine their names, places of birth, secret dreams, list of crimes?” he asks, sarcasm perhaps a bit too thick, trying to think through the distracting thudding. His fingers curl around a bit of trim on the box, release.

“Guess I’m expecting too much, huh?”

“That sort of sorcery is really more in your family’s line of expertise than mine.” Parry, jab.

“Yeah, fuck you too,” Belmont laughs, breathless.

“Mm.”

Quiet for a moment, as the dirt continues to pile up. Then, an olive branch: “And, I mean. I’m not assuming they all committed crimes.”

Adrian tongues at his teeth, thinking. “Oh, I’m sure some of them were absolute bastards, as you would say.”

“Probably most of them. But that’s not the point, is it?”

A beat of silence, then: “What _is_ the point, Belmont? Why are you doing this?”

The steady cycle of crunching dirt, overarm swing, shower of dirt into the grass draws to a quiet stop. Belmont sighs, doesn’t reply. Starts digging again.

Fine. Not getting an answer. Adrian turns his head, gazes out over the rest of the graveyard. They’d ended up here, in a distant corner, not because Belmont was trying to keep this burial site away from his family, but simply because there was almost nowhere else left to dig. The stones range across the grounds, uneven rows, some broken and moss-covered with the wear of centuries, some twenty years young and glinting white in the sun. So many of them, _too_ many of them for only one family and three centuries. Belmont had mentioned, once, that he’d had six siblings growing up, and it had seemed ridiculous at the time, like something that peasants did because they risked losing half their children to dysentery and consumption and the violence of poverty. There should be no reason a noble family would need to be so prodigious with their offspring, and he’d said as much, merciless in his mocking.

Adrian wonders, idly, how many of those siblings are buried here. Wonders in a sidelong sort of way, defenses skittish about letting the thought in, how he ever thought mocking someone’s dead family was even vaguely fair game.

And maybe this absurdly overpopulated cemetery feels like a legacy of persecution and murder to him, but nothing is ever that simple and it’s a legacy also of sacrifice. The Belmonts did not fight their battles lightly, or win easily. And if Adrian himself wishes not to be held accountable for the sins of his father—

Trevor is digging in silence, limned in the sunlight like stained glass, like a study in penance.

The coat and gloves come off before he realizes it, draped shroud-like across the box. Adrian stands, stills the arm on the shovel; the hunter’s skin is hotter and drier than it should be, and he’s no longer sweating. “Take a break, Belmont. I can finish this more quickly than you can anyway.”

Trevor plants the blade of the shovel in the dirt, leans on the handle. Doesn’t surrender it. Narrows his eyes, like he’s trying to work this out. “You’ll get your nice shirt all dirty,” he says, challenging.

“Despite what you obviously believe, clothes _can_ be washed,” Adrian says, indulging the back-and-forth. “They don’t actually become better at deflecting blows when you let a _crust_ build up on them. Go on, get out of the sun.”

“That’s supposed to be what _we_ say to _you_.”

“Perhaps—”

“You haven't even got your pretty sunhat.”

“—but I’m not the one currently about to swoon from heatstroke.” He grins, toothily. “Ten minutes in the sun won’t kill me.”

Another moment’s contemplation, then Trevor wordlessly tips the handle of the shovel toward him. He’s grumbling under his breath as he drops hard to the ground under the sheltering tree, something about how he _wasn’t going to swoon, damn it_ and _fucking show-off, ten minutes my arse_ and _it had better not._

Adrian ignores the words, smiles lightly. He turns to the narrow chimney of a hole, makes quick work of the remaining depth, and when the task is done and his unknown countrymen laid finally to rest, he gifts Trevor a quiet noise of gratitude and hauls him back into the cool of the castle.

* *

The pages of the large index volume skip past his fingers, feather-soft and remarkably even, smelling like vanilla and old, old ink.

It’s been days since the impromptu funeral, and as is common in late summer, the heat of that day had quickly broken into a thunderstorm that had not completely gone away since. Adrian’s been down here in the hold for a few hours, avoiding a heavy downpour that had started when he was just closing the stone over him. He can hear the rainfall on the roof of this place, even if the others wouldn’t have been able to, and it’s been relentless; he’s close to giving up on waiting and just braving the wet.

On the page below him, a few simplistic doodles of common demons in the margins, more decorative than anything else. Adrian narrows his eyes, feels an impulse rise in him with the distinct texture of _you’re going to regret this but you’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?_

He steps away from the lectern and gravitates to where he knows the Belmonts’ family volumes were stored—journals, references, the ones they wrote and kept up themselves, the most vital information distilled down into only few dozen volumes that span an unremarkable length of shelf. He walks among them, touching each spine in turn with a light possessiveness, a faint sense of taboo. Push-pull, like most of the things down here.

He knows when he’s found it, bound in a brilliant burgundy, the spine detail ornate and lush, hand-leafed with gold and inlaid with braid. Touching it feels electric, feels like falling down and down, into a slippery darkness even he will never escape from. He grits his teeth, pushes through the ward—not black magicians his arse—and pulls the volume from the shelf.

The Belmont family bestiary.

Adrian settles to the floor right there in the stacks, because holding this thing is making him dizzy no matter how he fights it. He leafs through; it appears to be alphabetical, which seems strange—how would they insert an entry, when they found something new? Perhaps this is a later copy.

_Wyvern. Werewolf_. He’s in the right area, at least, but pauses for a moment to study the illustration set in next to the text, tracing his finger along the scratchy ink. It’s a ferocious creature, all fur and teeth and moonlight, arching its back against the sky, menace rippling off of it in waves. The eyes are shockingly alive. It’s beautiful work.

He flips a few pages, finds the entry on vampires, which is a little underwhelming; the drawing isn’t anything he hasn’t seen in his own battles, and the text, while unnecessarily colored by human-centric religious rhetoric, is basically accurate.

But that isn’t really why he pulled this book down, is it?

This entire exercise started as an impulse, and he lets impulse guide him, flipping a large chunk of the book at once to get back to the beginning of the alphabet. Individual pages he turns carefully, almost as if he’s afraid of finding what he’s looking for.

Then it’s there, under his fingers: _Dhampir_.

He doesn’t even get to the text, doesn’t get the chance to assess its accuracy; he feels his stomach lurch sickeningly as the page comes into view.

Staring out of the book at him: a child.

A fanged child, eyes dead and empty, poised in an aggressive, predatory stance, blood sluicing down her face and ground into unkempt hair and ragged clothes, but still—a child. Eight years old at most, and if the picture is to be believed, too feral to be allowed to live.

And that’s it. He understands with sudden, horrible clarity: that is all the Belmonts ever knew of his kind. Child-shaped monsters that never grew up, because they had never allowed it to happen. It’s little wonder he’s never met another, in all his travels.

_Born with half a soul_ , the caption under the picture reads, _and trapped in the body of an abomination. Death is merciful; it sets the soul free from the monster._

Adrian closes his eyes, presses on them with his hand, trying to steady himself. It’s the same dizziness he’s been feeling for months, or it’s the dizziness from the book’s ward, or it’s the dizziness of realization: _this is what he was taught_.

But Trevor Belmont is not his father, is not his father’s father, or that man’s father before him. He did not pen this entry, or illustrate it. He did not put those skulls behind glass. He has treated Adrian like the bastard he knows he can be sometimes, but never like a creature with only half a soul.

Adrian pulls himself to his feet, shoves the book back into its place on the shelf and, steadied by its absence, heads back up into the storm.

* *

He squeezes his hair out as best he can in the entryway, tries to finger-comb it into something resembling order, but when he passes by the mirror in the hallway and catches a glimpse of himself, Adrian is startled into stillness.

His hair is tangled and limp and bedraggled, darkened by the water, laying in thick strands against his face like liquid. He’s paler than he remembers being the last time he checked; his eyes look sunken, dark and red-rimmed in that entirely human way of not ever getting enough sleep. He looks, as Trevor would say, like shit.

It’s tempting to just move on, to laugh about what a number the storm’s done on him and just chalk it up to that, but instead: he lets his mouth hang open, bringing his fangs into the picture, and no—he doesn’t just look like shit. He looks like a caricature of desperate, starving ferocity.

* *

So: to the baths before engaging in any human interaction, then. A rinse and a towel-off and a proper brushing, and the heat does some good for his complexion, but there’s not a lot he can do for his eyes, and how much they’re starting to look like the hollow pits in the drawing, sunken and dead and hungry.

* *

He considers, over dinner, bringing up what he’d seen. Not because he really thinks Trevor has an answer that can possibly satisfy him, or even should be forced to produce one; it’s just eating him up, the inked lines of the illustration circling through his head, the crazed eyes and fangs and claws, and a question: _Is that how they see me?_ _A soul-sick child who never realized that he wasn’t supposed to live?_

But Trevor is in a better mood than usual tonight, laughing over something to do with Sypha’s tiny carrots, which yes, she probably pulled up too early. And this line of questioning would make him defensive, would cause a fight, and strangely, Adrian finds he just doesn’t have the heart for it right now.

Maybe Trevor’s finally growing up a little. Maybe Adrian is, too. Or maybe something important happened out there, under the blistering sun and the watchful, accusing eyes of all of Trevor’s family ghosts. Maybe something changed.

He thinks about Sypha taking his arm in the aftermath of the final fight here, leading him out into the dawn. Thinks about Trevor reaching out of the wagon to send one last goodbye, free from all the antagonistic posturing.

Thinks about them coming back for him, after all the danger, and fighting like creatures possessed in that sparring field, and holding his hands in the come-down—and has to close his eyes for a few seconds.

The carrots, for whatever it’s worth, taste fine. Not amazing or anything—they’re just carrots. But they’re fine.

* *

Sypha drags them both out onto the roof of one of the farthest spires every few nights, to watch the stars come out and wind their way across the night sky. The late summer evenings are pleasant, and the storm has broken at least for now, but there’s a breeze coming out of the distant mountains that drives them to cleave a little closer to each other than they would ever do under the heat of midday. It’s in these moments that Adrian can feel the ghosts clinging their tightest around him, as he lies here gazing into the same starscape that the tortuous, roaring black haze of his father’s dissolution had escaped into; the same night sky the twisting ribbon of his mother’s pyre had risen up into, smoke and ash and worse.

So, these two: they give him their voices and their affection and their humor, and their warmth, and Trevor his sarcasm—press close and talk to him and try to draw him out and even make him laugh on occasion. They do the best they can to dispel the past for an hour at a time. It doesn’t seem to bother them that by the next time they step out onto this precipice, the ghosts are always back again. He never claimed that this would be an easy, one-and-done exorcism; hearts and minds don’t work that way. Nor did he demand their commitment to this cause.

Tonight, though, he can feel the ghosts’ grip on him loosen up, allow him to smile more easily—even up here in the twilight hall of memory. He pushes aside the bestiary, and the skulls, and the graveyard too thick with bones, and his fear over what happened to these two, while they were out there getting into trouble on their own; for a few minutes at least, he is just sitting on a roof with his closest friends, his _family,_ with a beautiful view of the stars and the swollen, pallid moon stretching out above them all. He can see the moonlight reflecting humor in Sypha’s eyes and a relaxed sort of ease in Trevor’s, both of them glinting like blue-white jewels, and why not? Laughter and camaraderie and contentment, after all, have as much a place among the stars as sorrow ever has.

*

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This bit, the part with Trevor burying a bunch of skulls in his backyard like a serial killer's dog, was one of the first things I visualized when I was framing out this story. 
> 
> Poor Adrian. :(


	5. Chapter 5

*

So here’s the thing about contentment, even the faint kind that comes with knowing things _will_ get better but haven’t yet: it breeds complacency. It makes every night feel like a quiet triumph and every morning feel like a clean slate, and maybe the stuff in between is pretty shit at times but if you can hold onto the nights and the mornings, you can keep yourself on a pretty even keel. Only sometimes the shit in between is _such_ shit that you damn yourself for ever waking up that day and you don’t know if you’re going to make it to the night, and the metaphor kind of falls apart.

“Back away,” Trevor says, enunciating with deadly clarity through the fury that’s threatening to choke him. His sword is up, is aimed at the stranger’s chest, an extension of Trevor’s arm and will. “ _Now._ ”

But how do you get to these absolute _shit_ moments? Sypha could probably do a philosophical deep dive on the topic, complete with non-absolute interpretations of time, but as far as Trevor’s concerned, the answer is pretty simple: you overconfidently decide to take on a roving band of night creatures in your own stupid backyard, ignoring how fucked up it is that they're out in the middle of the day; you notice that there’s an amateur hunter in the mix who’d been trailing them this far; you decide in the heat of the moment to join forces with the poor bastard, only to find out that he is, in fact, just a straight-up normal sort of bastard.

“Alucard?” Trevor says, and he can hear the nerves in his voice. “Sort of need you to stop growling and tell me if you’re okay.”

A strained voice from behind him, fighting for control. “…no.”

The infuriating thing, the thing that’s making Trevor’s blood boil? This is his fault. He’d been too wrapped up in his own heroics, too busy choking out one demon to realize another was above him, ready to drive its horrible praying-mantis scythe of an arm into his back. So Alucard had had to intervene, but Alucard had been across the fucking field at the time; he’d had to do that ghosty sliding thing to get there in time. Which, in retrospect, seriously gave the game away.

And this sneaky asshole who _they don’t even know why he’s really here_ had seen red eyes for a moment, had seen movement too fast to be human, and had thought, oh hey, vampire! Even though it’s the middle of the damn day! And had lashed out before either of them had a chance to realize who the new enemy was.

Trevor grits his teeth, bites back on the panic and rage. “Hang on, you hear me? I’ll take care of _this_ , then I’ll take care of you.”

Which is precisely how Trevor has come to be standing in a field full of dead demons, between Alucard and some bugnuts crazy bastard who fancies himself a hunter, Alucard’s blood dripping from the blade of the longknife in the man’s fidgety grip. The dhampir is hunched to the ground and curled over the gash in his side, growling off and on from behind Trevor’s back like a wounded animal. Trevor doesn’t know yet how bad it is, but the fact that it hasn’t healed yet is setting off all kinds of panic bells—consecrated weapons, silver, who knows what else. God damn it, the stupid _fucking_ bastard who thinks nothing can touch him and apparently doesn’t know when to _fucking_ dodge.

Trevor finds that he is, not to put too fine a point on it, _mildly fucking annoyed._

The hunter waves the knife in agitated frustration; Trevor notes distantly how the blood arcs off of it, catching the noon light in a brilliant shimmer of red and gold. “What is _wrong_ with you?” the man demands. “Why would you—oh.” The man’s face twists, disgust writ on every feature; his eyes have fallen to Trevor’s chest, where gold stitching glints. “Of course. You’re the _Belmont,_ back from perdition. I’d heard rumors, hoped they weren’t true. No wonder you’re defending a demon. _”_

“I’m saving an innocent life. Sort of what we do.”

“It was trying to attack you,” the hunter says coolly, disdainfully, with the taunting air of _you can’t_ _prove me wrong_. “And me.”

“He was doing nothing of the sort, and you know it. But you don’t really care, do you? You just saw something you didn’t understand and decided to _kill it_.”

“I understand this sort of devilspawn just fine, _Belmont_ ,” he says, spitting the word like a curse. “Anyone truly on the side of righteousness would. That _thing_ has to die.” He levels the knife at Trevor, a gesture more than a real threat; with Trevor’s sword in skewering position, he can’t get close enough to use it. The man’s dark eyes flash with a wild, almost childlike anticipation. “And you with it, if need be.”

“That _man_ ,” Trevor corrects, vaguely wishing that Alucard would stop with the _hissing_ ; he holds his ground, fighting back an urgent, possibly unreasonable itch to do more with his sword than just keep distance between them. “Is the reason half the people in this country are still _alive_.”

The man’s face curls up in a snarl. “Is that all it takes, for you? One accidental good deed and a demon gets to roam free?”

“And you’re not _righteous,”_ Trevor snarls, ignoring the attempt at diversion. “I can see it in your eyes; you’re enjoying this too much. You’re not in this to cleanse the world of evil or protect _anyone_.”

“I am—”

“No you’re not,” Trevor says, and he can taste the disgust in his voice like he can feel his heart in his ears, like he’ll be able to smell the dead and burning demons around them for days. “You’re in it for the fucking _bloodsport_.”

 He takes a step forward, leading with his blade. The other man takes a frustrated step back.

“You think this is _fun_ ,” Trevor continues, voice like steel.

“It’s a great honor.”

“It’s a _necessary evil_ ,” Trevor corrects him, taking another step forward. “When it’s even necessary at all. Some of us are born into that burden, into knowing that we either do these horrible things, make these impossible choices, or else _good people die_. You? You’re just playing a _game._ ”

“And you’re denying that your blood sings on the hunt?” the man tries again, backing up to keep the distance between them. His hand on the longknife twitches. “You’re denying that there’s a thrill to it?”

“Sure there is,” Trevor says, mouth twisting into a grim half-smile. “In the _hunt_. But this isn’t a hunt. This is just opportunistic _murder_.”

Behind him, the growling and hissing have trailed off finally. A voice replaces them, thready and with a note of panic: “… _Belmont_?”

He can’t look. Don’t look, _don’t look,_ keep your eyes on the threat. He’s sturdy, he’s a fucking vampire, he’ll live, but not if Trevor drops his guard and lets this lunatic get another shot in. “You’re a disgrace to the profession,” he says, driving the point home with one more step forward.

“And you’re a disgrace to humanity. But I guess I shouldn’t expect more from you, _Belmont_. You people were always _unnaturally fond_ of monsters.”

The itch in Trevor’s hand, in his brain, intensifies; it screams for blood, and as the voice and the face in front of him melt back into the flickering black-and-white of distant memory, clicking into context with a sound like crackling fire and screams in the night, he suddenly understands why.

“ _You,”_ he says, feeling the rage seeping into his face; he can almost feel the blood running from a gash long-healed. “You’re from the village, aren’t you? From the church? You were _there_ , fifteen years ago.”

A taunting smirk, a dismissive gesture with the blade. “ _Everyone_ was there.”

“But _you_ were right up there at the front. You threw one of the first torches,” Trevor snarls.

“And how could you possibly remember that?”

“Funny how you tend to remember the faces of the people who _killed your entire family_ ,” and god, Trevor understands the notion of seeing red, now. He can taste the adrenaline in his throat, climbing. “And now you dare to come here and— _I should kill you where you stand.”_

“Most everyone stood by their God-given duty, that day. And everyone cursed the day that you returned,” the man says, but the taunt feels thin, stretched over a glimmer of genuine fear. “You’d have to kill the whole village.”

“Then maybe I will,” Trevor says, a metallic glint of ferality in his voice. “But I’ll start with you.”

For a moment, Trevor can’t hear anything except the blood pounding in his ears, the voices of his parents and his siblings and all the ancestors whose deaths bought these people’s lives and freedom over and over again; the remembered cacophony of voices howling for their blood, stone crumbling, wood catching and splintering in the heat—

Then, that strained and quiet voice behind him again. “Bel— _Trevor,”_ it says, the hard-catching sound of it speaking a world of agony. “ _Think_.”

Those two words cut through his rage like a bucket of freezing river water, snap him out of the memory and remind him all at once that more exists than the injustices done to him alone, that he has other priorities. That this is the second time Alucard has had to lay there bleeding, watching as someone he cared about began a useless, bloody rampage of revenge. Oh dear _god_. And maybe he could argue that this is more justified—this is one of the people who actually took his family away, and the rest of the village was complicit—but no one should have to go through that _once_ , much less twice.

 _And anyway,_ his brain tosses out the absurdity, _if you burn down the entire village, where will we get our eggs and butter?_

 _Also: murder is bad, even if it’s revenge-murder. Mom would be disappointed; Sypha will be_ pissed _._

Trevor bites his lip hard, takes a deep breath through his nose. Wants to close his eyes against all of this, but doesn’t dare.

“Leave now,” he says finally, and it grates against his every instinct. “Don’t _ever_ come back here again. If I ever find you on this property or anywhere near it, or if you even _breathe_ _threateningly_ at me or mine, I _will_ kill you.”

Trevor lowers his sword a bit as a show of… well, not of good faith, but at least of a willingness to not stab the man in the back while he runs. And for a moment, it looks like the hunter is going to do as he’s been told, his face crumpling and his body language drawing in, defeated.

Then three things happen all at once:

Alucard starts coughing behind him, a hard, wrenching thing that sounds wet and _very_ unhealthy;

Trevor turns his head fractionally in response, before he can catch himself;

And the hunter takes the moment of distraction to fling the knife hard toward Alucard, using that window in Trevor’s defense, face twisted up in a snarl of last-chance determination—screw Trevor’s warnings, he will make this kill if it’s the last thing he does.

 _No,_ Trevor thinks, and he thinks: _You can’t have him._

So: fuck it. He warned the bastard.

Trevor brings the sword around in a fast arc, the ancient steel of the old family blade ringing as it connects with the knife midair, throwing its path completely wide—then coming back down hard, splitting the coward open from collar to hipbone. The man falls backward in a stumbling heap, shocked expression quickly icing over into blankness. Trevor wonders, detached, if in three centuries, this blade has ever tasted human blood before today.

Then there’s a groan from behind him, another wracking cough, and there’s no more time for wondering anything; he spins on his heel—

“Oh, Jesus wept,” Trevor mutters under his breath, something inside his chest going ice cold at the sight, blade dropping from suddenly nerveless fingers.

“Not for me, he didn’t,” Alucard manages, voice weak, shattered.

“Shut up,” Trevor snarls, dropping down next to Alucard, hands floating above him like he doesn’t know where to touch. He doesn’t even know how bad it really is in the context of Alucard being a semi-indestructible fucking vampire, but it’s sure as hell bad enough—there’s a gaping slash across his left side, under his ribs and all the way around to the back. It’s deep, and the edges are blackened and stink of charred flesh and sulfur, and it _isn’t healing_. At all. There’s blood _everywhere_ , soaked into Alucard’s pristine white shirt and smeared all up his arms and pooling in the grass. His dark trousers are stiff with it. When he coughs, more comes up.

 _He’s bleeding out_ , a miserably blunt part of his brain tells him. _Like a human would._

_He’s going to die like a human, too._

“Okay,” Trevor says, taking a breath, mentally digging through his memory stores for the Hunt-Gone-Wrong survival lessons. First thing is to get him upright, so that he will stop _drowning in his own blood._

“Come on,” he says, “Up we go,” slinging one cold arm over his own shoulders, hauling Alucard up until he’s sort-of sitting. His breathing does seem to improve with the change in position, for whatever that buys them; he’s still bleeding like a stuck boar.

“Hurts,” Alucard rasps wetly, hand clawing at his side, clawing at the arm supporting him. “Trevor—”

“I know, it looks like shit,” Trevor says, because encouragement is not his strong suit. He tries to peel Alucard’s hand away from the wound, gives up when it doesn’t budge. “And it’s not healing. Because of the knife, you think?”

“You’re the expert in… hunting vampires…”

Trevor shakes his head. “I thought maybe it was consecrated, but you didn’t respond this way to the whip. Those healed right up. Maybe a silver blade? Or both, like the Morning Star. Not sure where he would have gotten something like that, though…”

Except, wait. He knows _exactly_ where the bastard got it, doesn’t he? “…shit.”

A vague shrug that clearly hurts, and a trailed-off mumble; Alucard starts to list off to the left.

“Hey,” Trevor says, getting a firmer grip on him, “Don’t pass out on me here.”

“Trying,” Alucard strains out, his voice floaty and strange. What kind of weapon made the wound suddenly seems less relevant; he’s going downhill too quickly. If he were fully human, he would almost assuredly already be dead.

Trevor bites his lip, then after a moment’s hesitation, nods decisively to himself. He’s going to get disowned from beyond the grave for this, but… “Listen. I think you need blood.”

Alucard rolls his head toward him, fixes his gaze for a moment… then, incomprehensibly, starts laughing, a quiet, wheezy, high-pitched hysteria that sounds like it hurts. “You _think_. You _think_ I… need blood? What… tipped you off?”

“Yeah, sorry for being late to the party,” Trevor says, unlacing his bracer one-handed, trying not to think about what he’s doing.

“Always were slow.”

A low, humorless laugh; Trevor shakes his head. “Can you not stop being an arsehole even when you’re _dying?”_

A shocked silence in response, punctuated by small gasps. Yeah, that shut him up. Probably never thought he’d hear those words applied to him; _death_ and _dying_ just aren’t in most vampires’ vocabularies.

“Anyway, this is your fault,” Trevor continues. “You’ve been neglecting this, haven’t you? For fuck knows how long, and now you’ve got no reserve.”

“I don’t normally need—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Trevor cuts him off, not interested in arguing about it. He resettles himself cross-legged, facing Alucard’s side. “Because you definitely need it now.”

Half-lidded eyes track his fingers as he works the lacing. “What are you doing?”

“Look, let’s not even pretend that this isn’t what has to happen.” He shucks the bracer completely, rolls his wrist to work out the stiffness of holding that sword straight out like that for so long. “It was only a matter of time anyway, and you don’t have the breath to spare on being coy. Anyone asks, we can tell them we argued about it a lot, you got precious and insulted, I made some absolutely brilliant point that you couldn’t help but concede—”

Even through the pain and the dizziness, Alucard narrows his eyes at that one. “That seems like cheating—”

“And you got to do your self-sacrificing martyrdom speech where you make sure that I’m really okay with this, _really really okay_ —"  

“What do _martyrs_ have to do with—”

“Which I am.” Trevor pushes a hand back through Alucard’s hair, clearing it away from where it’s hanging in his face. “So let’s just skip ahead to the part where _you_ don’t have a, a blood-fountaining hole in your gut anymore and _I_ don’t have to worry about you dropping dead before Sypha gets back from town, because if you think I’m going to be hurting from this, holy shit does it not hold a candle to what she would do to me then.”

He’s ended his speech with his wrist thrust out in front of a goddamned broken, bleeding, starving vampire and _oh god what is he even doing._ Maybe that church hunter had it right, maybe something really is wrong with him because he barely even feels afraid, even if he is purposely looking in any other direction than down at his own pulse point.

Too-cool fingers touch his wrist, and he can feel a sigh breathed out against the skin. “…you’re a Belmont,” comes the feeble, last-ditch protest. “They’d never forgive you.”

 _I’m the only Belmont left,_ Trevor thinks, a little contrary, a little giddy. _And I guess_ I _get to decide what that means, now._ “I’m also your friend, you stupid bastard,” is what he actually says out loud, turning back to look Alucard in the eyes—the eerily ruby-red, faintly glowing eyes, staring back into his for an uncomfortable length of time. Searching, wanting an answer to his actual question.

“They’re dead,” Trevor offers into the silence, voice low, because this feels like a kind of sacrilege. “You’re alive.”

Unspoken: _Though not for much longer if you don’t fucking take what you need, here._

“Not the wrist,” Alucard finally breathes, quietly. There’s a sigh of resignation in the words, laced with cast-iron restraint. A sharper-than-usual fingernail rasps over the tight cords and bands under the skin there. “I so much as nick a tendon… you might never be able to hold your weapons properly again.”

“Uh, sure,” Trevor says, eyes going wide and nerves ratcheting up a couple of notches; he hadn’t really been thinking any scary thoughts aside from the whole _getting drained dry_ angle. He laughs a little, to cover it. “Guess I should be grateful that your mother was a doctor, huh?”

“Mm,” Alucard hums in agreement, still hovering over his wrist, inhaling deeply enough to be just this side of creepy. Then his grip turns to steel and he pulls, reeling Trevor in by the arm. For a heart-stopping second, Trevor thinks he’s going to just go straight for his throat, his whole body and mind and long-suffering soul suddenly working in concert to decide whether to fight back if that happens, because of course he has to help Alucard but a buried, primitive part of his brain is starting to panic, _panic_ , terror bubbling over from that deep dark place where all of his ancestors have died—

—then the tension eases and Alucard is just pushing his sleeve further up, searching fingers settling into the inner crook of his elbow. “…here.”

Trevor swallows, pushes back on the adrenaline surge. Scoots closer to accommodate the pull, and wills himself to stillness. “Safer there?”

“Much.” And without any further preamble—and hell, isn’t that what Trevor had demanded?—he curls forward around Trevor’s arm, more _falling_ forward than anything else, and bites down. _Hard._

“Aagh,” Trevor manages, barely. “ _Oh, Christ_.” His whole body has tensed up around that one point, that innocuous little spot on the inside of his elbow that he’s never had reason to pay any special attention to until now, fingers spastically grasping and releasing empty air. His vision swims in and out of focus, greying on the edges. It’s not even that it hurts—which it _does_ , holy shit, but he’s borne all manner of pain on his skin and under it and it will be a snowing, blizzardy day in Hell before a Belmont is brought low by simple pain—it’s just so invasive and _skin-crawly_ , the feeling of teeth in his flesh, in his veins, jostling nerves in all the wrong ways, and he feels like he’s going to be sick, he’s— _oh goddamn it Trevor don’t throw up on him you’re trying to do something good here—_

Then Alucard shifts, grip and posture loosening, and the fangs slip out of his arm. All that’s left is a hand cupping his elbow and a soft mouth pulling at what’s now free-flowing blood, the gentle suction feeling strange against freshly bruised skin but it’s so much better, so much easier to handle. It’s just a _tickle_. He’s tough and world-weary and a survivor, and he’s _seen some shit_ , and he can still taste his own panic when he’d really thought Alucard was going to bleed out on him, can feel the body against him straightening, strengthening—and he can handle this.

He tries to relax his arm, hand blindly seeking something for support; a cooler hand threads into it, gentle and firm. His head dips forward with a long, shuddery exhale, forehead coming to rest on Alucard’s shoulder.

They didn’t discuss the _how will he know when to stop_ question, on account of Trevor insisting that they not discuss anything at all, but even as he starts feeling a little dizzy, a little woozy, a little like maybe that was a bad idea after all… it’s fine, it’s okay. He trusts Alucard. He didn’t always, but he’s fought and killed and very nearly died with him; next to that, this is nothing.

He trusts him.

* *

Somewhere in there: Soothing whispers and pressure on his arm, and Sypha, and worried noises and movement. Bandages. Something warm in his hands.

* *

“She wouldn’t actually have hurt you, you know,” Alucard says later, well after sunset, nursing a cup of hot cider in the castle library while Trevor lounges in one of the huge, sinfully cozy chairs; two empty mugs and an apple core sit on the table at Trevor’s elbow. “If I had—”

“I know,” Trevor says, cutting him off before that thought can reach its conclusion. He doesn’t even bother opening his eyes; he’s feeling really drifty and comfortable, and also like if he takes a chance on vision, it might still be wobbling. “Still the less painful option, bizarrely enough.”

“What wouldn’t I have done?” Sypha asks from above, up one of the ladders, on her way back down with a heavy volume in tow. She’s been determined to figure out why exactly the knife had caused so much damage, and has been up in the stacks for hours, as the two of them quietly recuperate below.

“Hurt me. If bat-boy had died on my watch.”

“For the love of—you do a transformation _once_ —"

“Oh, I would probably have skinned you alive,” Sypha says casually, almost cheerily, paging through the book and wandering over toward them to settle into another of the chairs.

“See? I told you,” Trevor says, pointing at Alucard, grinning and triumphant in having proven his point. He flicks at his bandaged arm with a finger. “What’s a little nip, compared to the wrath of an enraged Speaker magician?”

“And if you,” Sypha addresses Alucard without even looking up from the pages, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, “had taken too much and hurt him, I would have shaved all your hair off in your sleep.”

“Now that’s just ridiculous,” Alucard sniffs, playing at dignity. The effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that he pretty much looks like death on toast, and is wearing a dressing gown and sleep pants; his clothes had proved unsalvageable.

“And why’s _he_ get off so easy?” Trevor puts in.

Sypha is openly smiling now. “Because he has been through enough today already.” Her brow pinches for a moment as she hms thoughtfully at something in the book—taps a line of text and then goes flipping through to another section. “And because he values his hair more than you value your own skin, apparently.”

Alucard raises an eyebrow. “Are you calling me vain?”

“No.” Sypha glances up from the book to the actual knife, lying on the table along with Trevor’s discarded mugs. She shakes her head, keeps flipping pages. “I’m calling Trevor _reckless_.”

“Time was,” Trevor complains affectionately, head lolling back against the cushion, “you’d threaten to incinerate him for hurting me. What happened, huh?”

“You decided to willingly throw yourself onto his fangs, is what happened. I can’t pin all of that on him. Oh, stop looking so pathetic,” she teases gently, mouth curled into an affectionate smirk. “You brought this on yourself, and you’re hardly _dying._ ”

“I might be dying a _bit._ ”

“You’re not,” Alucard cuts in smoothly, setting down his now-empty mug and dropping gracefully into the third chair in the cluster. He’s not even stiff; you’d never know to look at him that he’d been so grievously wounded. He’s still paler than usual, though, and sort of dark around the eyes. “I barely had more than a pint or two, which doesn’t even justify the way you’re acting right now.”

Trevor has found that there are times when what his brain says and what his mouth says are wildly out of sync. Right now, the thought his brain tosses out is, _That’s not really enough though, is it?_

“Ahah, did you hear that?” is what his mouth actually says, as he tries to catch Sypha’s eyes. “I need a couple pints, to replace what he took, the bastard.”

Sypha doesn’t look up, serenely turning a page. “I may be wrong about this—after all, I’m only a scholar and a magician. But I do not think blood and ale are interchangeable.”

“You’re not wrong,” Alucard says, quiet and amused.

“Shit. Fine.” Trevor levels his gaze on Alucard, pointing unsteadily. “I’ll cede to your _expert blood knowledge_ since I’m not a doctor _or_ a fucking vampire, but I still think I deserve a drink. I was a _good friend_ today.”

A beat of silence. There’s something heavy settling out of the air, like a storm system moving in. Alucard leans forward in his chair, right up into Trevor’s personal bubble, eyes a bright blend of red and gold in the warm lamplight. For a moment, all Trevor can see is the arc of blood through sunlight—Alucard’s on the longknife, and the hunter’s on Trevor’s ancestral sword.

“You were,” Alucard says, voice shockingly bare in its sudden sincerity. “And I know what it cost you, both physically and in terms of your… relationship with your family legacy. I don’t take that lightly. Thank you, Trevor.”

The sentiment takes a moment to register, like an unexpected voice echoing up out of previously unsounded depths. Then Trevor is struck all at once, like a kick in the teeth, with just how beautiful the infuriating ass really is—not beautiful in that superficial, ‘I want to touch him’ sort of way, though if he’s honest there’s probably some of that buried way down in there too, but beautiful in the way of a field blanketed in fresh snow, or a grove of trees turning riotous and fire-hued in the autumn, or the early morning mist over mountains in the spring. The cornsilk hair, the eyes like summer honey—Alucard looks like a streak of sunlight falling through the dark woods, brilliant in its intensity, revitalizing in its warmth, a beacon to guide him—

Okay, wait. Stop. Trevor pinches the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes tightly against the rising headache. Blood loss _always_ makes him sentimental. He _knows_ this. And every time it happens, he forgets until it’s too late and he’s already waxing on with some poetic bullshit in his head, mooning over whoever pulled him out of death’s jaws this time around. Sometimes that even means mooning over _himself_ , which is clearly ridiculous and says a lot about his mental capacity in those moments.

But death’s toothy stupid maw was nowhere near him today, and really, they’re right: he hasn’t lost _that_ much blood.

When he opens his eyes again, Alucard is still there, head tilted slightly to the side, watching him. Still there, and still open-faced and sincere, and damn it all, still completely breathtaking no matter how wan and drawn he is.

“S’fine,” Trevor says, collapsing back against the chair again, taking back some distance. “My family’s fine.”

“Really? Not rolling in their graves?”

“Belmonts,” Trevor says to the ceiling, like a pronouncement, because he’s had a few hours now to think about this and he figures he can be forgiven a little drama as he _redefines his entire family legacy_ , “are bound by loyalty. We take care of our allies, no matter what that means. We also kill monsters, and that arsehole was a monster if I’ve ever seen one.”

“He wasn’t human?” Sypha looks up from her book again, sudden concern creasing her features. “That would change things.”

Trevor waves a hand, looks to her. “Oh, I’m sure he was human. But he was trying to murder an innocent man for no reason, and I don’t care what the bestiary says, that’s a monster in my book.” And hey, the monster had also helped burn down his home with his fucking family still inside, but he’s not going down that rabbit hole of nauseating, suppressed rage right now. He doesn’t have the energy; he doesn’t have enough alcohol on board; he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what it would look like after today, grief and hatred all wrapped up in guilt and mercy and the haze of bloodloss—all for the sake of one of his family’s most ancient enemies, this beautiful, miserable, golden creature sitting across from him that any of them would have killed in a heartbeat.

“…anyway,” Trevor says, forcibly boxing up that line of thought, pushing it back into its corner. “You would have done the same for either of us, so.”

A considered pause. “The defense, certainly. I’m… not really sure what the bloodletting would have accomplished, though, were the situation reversed,” Alucard says with a smirk, and thank god, _sarcasm_. Sarcasm he can deal with.

Also: “Euggh!” Trevor pulls a face. “Don’t be disgusting, you… disgusting _vampire._ ”

Sypha busts out laughing, very helpfully.

Trevor points, vaguely accusingly, at both of them. “Seriously, that’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

He gets swatted upside the head by a laughing Sypha, and Alucard gets a swat too because yes, he knew what Trevor meant, of course he did, but—

And the night goes on.

* *

There’s an incredibly noisy little bird outside his window, chirping away like its life or its sanity depends on it. Incessant. Just high-pitched enough to drill right through the pillow where Trevor has it curled over his head, already blistering headache biting in even harder.

“Shut _up_ ,” he growls, and considers for a moment launching the pillow through the window to see if that might accomplish more.

The bird does not shut up. Trevor does not throw his pillow, partially because he knows that the ward wouldn’t let it through, but mostly because he doesn’t really have the coordination right now.

So: now that he’s irrevocably awake, time to try to piece together the events of the night before. Historically, when he’s woken up feeling like this, there’s been something pleasant on the other side of that memory chasm—a great night at the pub, or very rarely, a _really great_ night in warm, charming company. And if there’s something unpleasant over there instead, he needs to know about it sooner than later.

He throws his arm across his face to block out the morning light; a dressing wrapped around his elbow catches on his cheek.

Oh. Oh, right. Okay.

Bad hunter. Bad hunter from the village, the bastard. Alucard bleeding out, biting him, Sypha heating him some cider? Alucard still looking like shit but no longer actively dying, which was great. And him making a harmless fool of himself in the library, begging for an ale, of which they only let him have one, in the end.

One drink. So why does he feel so hungover?

 _You probably have as much blood as Sypha, right now_ , says a voice in his head, insufferably cultured. _So you’re going to be as much of a lightweight as she is._

He groans because it is, apparently, true.

Still, with that all sorted in his head, he should feel more at ease. Instead, he’s restless, burrowing into the sheets on one side and then on the other, thoughts refusing to settle. There’s something in there he’s missing, his brain is telling him, but it won’t just tell him what it is, so it feels like he’s on a loop of nerves and disquiet.

No one is dead. Well, no one he cares about is dead. The hunter won’t be bothering them again. The knife was _probably_ stolen from the hold, but it’s back in their hands now. He’ll get back his alcohol tolerance in time. Hell, his arm doesn’t even hurt, not really. Alucard—

Ah. There it is. Even freshly fed, Alucard looked worse last night than he had before the attack, and of course he did—he lost far more into the grass than Trevor could possibly have replaced. But he’d looked terrible for the past few months too, ragged and hungry. Before yesterday, Trevor had assumed he _had_ to have been feeding at least occasionally again, even if he wasn’t doing it often enough to really thrive, or else he’d have passed out and not woken back up—but maybe that isn’t right. Maybe the knowledge he’s basing that assumption on is flawed. And ‘just enough to live’ isn’t an acceptable goal anyway, is still just self-loathing neglect, and he should have fucking said something a month ago, two months ago. Had meant to, a few times, but kept losing his nerve.

It’s possible that he’s a damned coward when it isn’t a joke or an emergency, when it comes to seriously, truly addressing the _what_ of Alucard instead of just the _who_ ; ironic, considering that used to be all he ever thought about, back in the early days after Greşit.

It’s also possible that he and Sypha have been accomplishing less here than they thought they were.

“Shit,” he mutters, closing his eyes.

“Tweet,” says the bird.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ever have a REALLY BAD blood draw? Like, the kind where the person doesn’t really know what they’re doing and they have to DIG AROUND in there and you start feeling all oogy and it’s like OH MY GOD JUST GET THE FUCKING BLOOD OUT OF ME BEFORE I PASS OUT OR PUKE ON YOUR SHOES and afterwards they’re sweet and apologetic and give you a cookie but you still have a bruise there the size of Wallachia? 
> 
> Yeah, well, Trevor has too.


	6. Chapter 6

*

Trousers and such re-acquired, Trevor wanders to the kitchen first, though judging by the angle of the light coming in through the hall windows…

Yeah. Breakfast has long since come and gone, the smell of spiced sausage and fresh bread lingering in the air, the stove still radiating a fading warmth from its cast-iron belly. Whatever, it’s fine; he’s not exactly starving. Unlike some people.

So: to the library? Sypha seemed pretty obsessed with figuring out that knife last night, and from what he remembers of those few days before they took on Dracula, she doesn’t just abandon a topic of research. He slips in quietly, weaving his way through the maze of shelves. She’s probably back where they were last night, if only he could remember where exactly that was.

Then he turns a corner, and he’s found her.

For a moment, though, he just stops and looks. She’s leaned back against the arm of the chair, legs tucked up under her, with the massive, ancient volume spread across her lap like it weighs no more than the knowledge in it. Light from the window is falling across her in a golden swath, and her focus is intense and undeniable; she looks like something out of a painting. _The Magician at Study_ or something like that. The only thing out of place is the bandage wrapped snugly around her elbow.

Oh.

“Hey,” he says, wandering over. “Any progress?”

She looks up, not even slightly startled. “I’m getting there. Tracking the lineage of inanimate objects is much harder than it seems, and there are many false leads.”

“And here I was,” he says, leaning on the nearest bookshelf, “hoping there’d just be a picture book somewhere with all the special weapons in it.”

“Like the ones used for identifying birds and useful plants and so on?” Sypha asks, smiling gently. “I knew you were more familiar with books than you let on.”

“Hey, those plant ones are important when you have to spend weeks in the field and you start running out of things. Food, medicine, will to live…” A beat of silence, as she turns a page. “Sorry I missed breakfast.”

“Oh!” Sypha says, eyes going wide. “I forgot. Here…” She leans over the arm of the chair, fishes up a paper-wrapped parcel from the floor next to it; it’s a little greasy on the bottom as she hands it over, and smells like the kitchen did. Unwrapping it reveals sausage slices, a hunk of cheese, a pear, a piece of crusty bread. Simple, but incredibly appealing right now in the wake of what is still an impressive hangover.

“Thanks, Sypha,” he says, shaking his head in mild disbelief at how lucky he’s been, to end up at this moment—sleeping every night in a comfortable bed, waking to someone who cares enough to set aside food for him while still getting on about her own, brilliant work. “You’ve saved this pitiful hunter’s life.”

“Actually,” she says, pointedly. “It was Adrian who packed that up for you.”

He coughs a little bit on the bread. “Really.”

“He said that after yesterday, he will not tolerate you skipping meals.”

He takes it a little slower this time, breaking off a bit of the cheese. Eyes her arm where it hooks casually over the arm of the chair. “Looks like he didn’t skip _breakfast_ today, either.”

Her brows draw in in momentary confusion, then it seems to connect. “Mm,” she hums, holding her arm out in front of her to regard the dressing. “I had a… rather stern conversation with him on the topic.”

“And of course I had to miss _that_ ,” Trevor grumbles.

“He was agreeable in theory,” she continues, ignoring him. “But he has some fairly strong opinions about feeding directly from humans, which is to say, he does not want to.”

“One of these days, he’s going to trip over that conscience and smash his head open.”

She swats him playfully. “Oh, come on. That conscience is the only reason you ever accepted him as an ally in the first place. And at least he has the courage to adhere to his own convictions.”

A stretch to let that settle in, and then Sypha purses her lips, like she’s trying to decide whether to add something.

“Don’t tell him I told you this,” she says finally, much quieter. “But apparently, you were his first.”

Trevor groans, pressing his hand to his face. “Oh my god, did you have to put it that way?”

Her brows furrow, confused. “Put it what way?”

“Like it’s… like we…” he waves his hand in a vague circle, trying to convey the entire realm of implication; he can feel heat rising up his cheeks.

Sypha looks at him, seemingly still uncertain what he’s getting at, and Trevor wonders: is he the only one whose brain keeps going there? And what does that say about him?

“Never mind,” he says. “I just, really didn’t need to know that. Though maybe that explains why he was so damn sloppy about it.”

“The fact that he was dying at the time probably did not help.”

“I just… really? In all those years, he hasn’t ever…”

Sypha frowns. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘all those years.’ Do you even know how old he is?”

Trevor shrugs, tucking into the sausage finally; save the best for last. “No idea, but I mean, he’s a vampire, so I assumed…”

Sypha tsks. “He’s nineteen.”

The bit of meat catches in Trevor’s throat, and for a horrible second, he thinks that this is how the Belmont line will end: choking on his own breakfast. Humiliating.

 _“What,”_ he wheezes, once he can breathe again. “He doesn’t look—"

“You’re a Belmont; how could you not know this?” Sypha sets a scrap of paper into the book, closes it; uses its breadth as a table for spreading out another, smaller volume. “They age very quickly, to a point.”

“I had no idea. It never came up.”

“I thought that monster book of yours has all the information one could ever need?”

“I’m beginning to realize,” Trevor says, balling up the paper around the core of the pear, maybe a little too angrily, if that is something that can be done in anger. He thinks it is. “That that book might be an actual crock of shit.”

“Excellent observation,” comes Alucard’s voice, the dhampir strolling noiselessly from the nearby stacks, four more books in tow. He looks… better. Not in full fighting trim yet, but better than last night.

Sypha grins hugely, reaches out towards him as if welcoming home a beloved, but they all know: it’s the books she wants.

He hands them over without hesitation. “You might find these more useful, they’re a bit more modern, encompassing the era in which the family was actually in Wallachia.”

“I still need to cross-reference with these Gaelic texts, though,” she says, thoughtfully. “I’m not as fluent in that language, so it’s slowing me down.”

“I’m sorry,” Alucard says, and it sounds genuine, “I doubt I’m any more competent with it than you are.”

“Wait,” Trevor says, holding up a hand. “Why Gaelic?”

Sypha leans over the books to the knife laying across the table; they’d retrieved the sheath from the hunter’s belt, so the gory context of its presence in their lives is, at least, hidden from sight. “Just look at it,” she says, handing it to him.

He takes it, turns it over in his hands, and yeah—the pommel of the thing is all intricate metalwork in the shape of a Celtic cross, a cut stone of pale, brilliant blue set into the core of the knotwork. The crossguard is inlaid with more of the same, in an abstract motif of dragons. “Huh. Haven’t had a chance to really look at it, I guess.”

He hands it back; she takes it with the hand attached to the bandaged arm, and suddenly Alucard seems uncomfortable, studying the floor.

“I’ll just… go see what else I can find, shall I?”

“Whoa, hold on,” Trevor says, snagging his sleeve before he can evaporate. “Sypha, will these keep you occupied for a while?”

“At the rate I’m going?” she says with a pained laugh. “They will keep me occupied for _days_.”

“Right,” he says, turning to Alucard. “Let’s take a walk, yeah?”

* *

“Is this going to be some sort of inquisition?” Alucard asks, sarcasm fully recovered after his ordeal yesterday, but it’s plastering over something fragile, something brittle. They’ve been walking in silence for a few minutes; Trevor hadn’t meant to let it stretch so long, but he’s gathering his thoughts. “Or you riding in on a white horse to protect the delicate Miss Belnades from the horrible monster? I’ll have you know she _insisted_.”

Trevor stops walking, looks at Alucard with an expression that he hopes conveys _What the absolute hell?_

And Alucard does look thrown, so he must have at least gotten it close. “You’re not upset because I…?”

A laugh bubbles over before Trevor can stop it. It’s just so ridiculous. “Wow. You really are an idiot, sometimes. Easy to forget, I guess.”

“…at the risk of furthering that impression: I don’t understand.”

“First of all: delicate my arse. Anything I can handle, Sypha can handle,” Trevor says, jerking his head to indicate _hey, let’s get back to walking_. Best way to outrun hangovers is to keep moving. “Anyway, if you hadn’t noticed, she does what she wants. What she _wants_ right now is to look after you, which I agree is probably a pretty good idea, since you’re doing such a shit job yourself.”

“Mm.”

“But now that you’ve opened up that fuckhive of a topic,” he continues, grabbing hold of whatever nerve he’s managed to gather up, getting his teeth into it hard. “Let’s talk about that. When _is_ the last time you fed? _Before_ yesterday,” he adds, because he can smell Alucard’s smartarsed bullshit coming from a mile off.

A deep, careful breath. Trevor can barely hear the footsteps beside him. “…I’m not sure, exactly. Shortly after the two of you left.”

“Okay,” Trevor says, counting to ten in his head because that makes _no goddamned sense_ and is also _maddening_ but he’s promised himself to give this an honest try. “How _exactly_ are you not dead, right now?”

“I think you’re overestimating how much I actually need it,” Alucard says airily, like he doesn’t really want to touch ground on this topic. “Yes, to maintain my abilities and strength, I need blood. But I don’t need it to _live_. Have not, in fact, since I was a child.”

Huh. That’s… not the impression Trevor had been under, but again: bestiary, possibly full of shit. “Sure needed it to live yesterday.”

Alucard says nothing, just sets his mouth in a hard line.

“Yeah, yeah,” Trevor continues. “Special circumstances, freak situation, I know. Only the three of us are really unusually likely to run up against unusual shit.” Or have unusual shit seek them out, more like. “And not being at full strength can be a death sentence in the world right now. So I think you actually _do_ need it to live. No matter how distasteful that is to your sensibilities.”

“You think this an issue of sensibilities?”

“What I think,” Trevor spools out slowly, because he’s still trying to figure this bit out himself, “is that you’re scared.”

“Oh, am I?” Incredulity. “Of what?”

Here we go. Trevor steels himself, gives those nerves a hard shake. “Of becoming like your father.”

Alucard halts in his tracks; Trevor takes another step or two before doing the same. He has his back to the dhampir, some old instinct wailing in his brain about his vulnerability, and he can feel the sudden flare of anger and tension and _hurt_ coming off of Alucard in waves, without even looking. It’s that palpable.

“Tell me that I’m wrong,” Trevor says, quietly, not turning around. “And I’ll never bring it up again.”

“I’m surprised you had the guts to bring it up at all,” Alucard says tightly.

A loose shrug. “Hey, you know me. I use up all my courage on fighting demons with sticks, doesn’t leave much for anything else.”

“And yet.”

“Yeah, well. Yesterday scared me more than this conversation does,” Trevor says. And this was supposed to be the time when things were getting _better,_ he doesn’t say, the time when they were all free of the demons, free to rebuild. Funny that it’s easier to admit to fear than it is to admit to having had _expectations_.

A long, quiet pause, then Alucard moves past him, up the hall, without so much as a brush of shoulders.

“The observatory is up ahead,” he offers back; Trevor takes two long strides to catch up with him. “…sit with me?”

* *

It’s a beautiful space, and one Trevor hasn’t stumbled on before; all dark polished wood and dim lighting, a low bookshelf circling the entirety of the room with a grace he’s never seen in woodwork, the handful of chairs upholstered in deep green velvet. Most impressive, though, is the broad dome arching overhead in organic, sweeping curves he didn’t think glass was capable of. It’s been blackened with some sort of pigment or paint, letting sunlight in only through the tiniest of pinpricks, each mapped to a star. It is unthinkably detailed.

“The dome rotates,” Alucard says, wistful, looking up into its invented depths. “Throughout the year, to keep the maps matched with the sky.”

“How do you ever see anything?” Trevor asks, slightly breathless.

Alucard gestures to the blackened glass. “That pigment is only dark in the sunlight. At night, it fades, becomes transparent; the entire sky is visible.”

That would be impressive, Trevor figures. Also intimidating, with no illusions between the eye and the infinite space of the heavens. There’s something cozier, more grounding, about the way it is now.

He counts out three breaths, then moves to settle into one of those far too plush chairs, gesturing to the one facing.

“So, are you the wise old aunt,” Alucard asks, collapsing into the indicated chair with a boneless sort of exhaustion; the taunt has no sting. “Ready to hand out life advice?”

“My aunts were pretty crap at that.” Trevor leans back a little, tipping his head back to regard the starry dome again. “But I’ve watched over a few tavern bars in my time.” Usually because he’d just punched out the tavern keeper but saw no reason to deprive the rest of the patrons of sweet, sweet libations. Whatever, not the point. “I do actually know how to listen.”

“A selectively applied skill, then,” Alucard says, and there’s a grin in his voice.

“ _Very_ selective,” Trevor laughs, looking back to Alucard. “You should thank your lucky stars you’ve got someone like me here to listen to your woes.”

That earns him a genuine laugh, even if it doesn’t last long, trailing off into silence.

“I’m so tired of _taking,”_ Alucard whispers.

Trevor waits. Above them, a band of stars so dense that it almost looks like mist, too much light in one place to make out any of that stunning detail. It’s easy to get lost in something that bright.

“When I was a child,” Alucard finally continues, voice unlike anything Trevor’s ever heard from him, “All I wanted was my mother’s attention. My father barely slept, was always there and always willing to teach me about that side of my heritage, but I _craved_ my mother’s attention. She was the one who taught me about her work, about humanity. Played chess with me, took me into the woods to find new plants and birds. I overheard this morning that you had similar pursuits.”

“Yeah,” Trevor huffs, smiling. “Who would have thought.”

“But sometimes, she was too tired to do those things. She pretended it was overwork, lack of sleep, but I knew better.” Alucard twists a fingernail into the arm of the chair, a bit sharper than it should be. “She never blamed him. But I did.”

“He was feeding from her.”

“Exclusively,” Alucard confirms, rolling his head against the chair back. “And to be fair, he didn’t need so much as to cause her any real harm. He saw it as an act of devotion, fidelity. I just thought it was selfish, not letting her offload any of that burden.”

Trevor narrows his eyes. “How old were you?”

A short, self-deprecating laugh. “Five or six. And with a predictable lack of insight or subtlety. But it seemed at the time, that his entire world revolved around taking. Even as humane as he was being about it, back then.”

A long silence; this room is vast but their breath doesn’t echo.

“My last meal,” Alucard says, like a recitation, “was from a three-quarters dead pig that I found in the livestock pens in the lower levels of the castle. Everything else had starved to death. It’s possible my father had blood stored, but I do not know where. I haven’t had the energy to search for it, or to hunt in the woods, and I _will not_ go to the villagers for this.”

“You’ve had the energy for gardening with Sypha, though.” Among other things.

A careless shrug. “That’s for _her_ happiness. That makes it easier.”

“They sell livestock down there, in the village,” Trevor says, trying to keep his voice neutral. “That wouldn’t have taken much effort.”

Alucard closes his eyes, runs his tongue along his teeth.

“It isn’t just the source, is it?” Trevor asks, careful.

“No. It isn’t.” A pained sigh, like he isn’t sure why he’s telling Trevor this, isn’t sure why he’s shared so much already. “Every drop of blood on my tongue reminds me that I’m part of that world.”

“I would think the fangs and the floating would tip you off to that,” Trevor says, voice low and flippant, and it’s a bad attempt at humor so it’s no surprise when Alucard just gives him an annoyed glare.

“The _selfish_ part of that world,” he clarifies, sharp. “Don’t misunderstand. I don’t loathe the thing that I am, only what it makes me feel compelled to do.”

Trevor just looks at him for a long moment; thinks about that sickening pain yesterday, about Sypha sitting in the sunlight with a book on her lap and a bandage on her arm, about how badly Alucard had _needed_ them and how easy it had been to overcome a lifetime of training to meet that need.

“I thought,” the dhampir says, face tightening, “if I could just live _quietly_ …”

Ah. Here we are. “You wouldn’t _need_ your strength or your powers. And that worked, as long as you didn’t have anyone to protect. Then we showed up.”

“You did. And then you ended up having to protect me, instead. I’m sorry it came to that. Clearly my fantasy of living something close to a human life was just that: a fantasy.”

Trevor taps his fingers on the chair’s arm, a dull rasping. “Yesterday…”

“…I wanted it,” Alucard says, voice wavering, like a man admitting to murder or treason. “You’ll never know how badly. I’ve been praying since we met than neither of you would ever offer.”

Christ. Alucard, Trevor thinks, has the most incredible willpower he’s ever seen. And also? Is a huge idiot, sometimes. “If you had just told us sooner…”

No response; Alucard stares up into the false starscape, still as a statue.

“Would it help,” Trevor offers, tentative, “if it was giving, and not just taking?”

The fingernail twists into the upholstery again, a sharp _skrrch_. “I don’t know.”

* *

“So all those dead animals. You couldn’t just… I don’t know, drain the bodies? Like they do in slaughterhouses?”

They’re back to walking. The observatory is a nice place to feel properly alone, but there’s a point where all that closeness becomes overwhelming, like the dome overhead is forcing them to fly too low, to circle too close to the truth of things for comfort.

“You’re really fixated on those animals, Belmont,” Alucard says, and he’s not wrong; this is the third time he’s brought it up, though before this point it’d mostly been to make sure he hadn’t left them all down there to rot. It’d taken too much work to get that smell out of the main hall as is.

“I just want to know how this works, _Țepeș._ ” Pause, take a breath. He’s gotten this far with honesty, as much as it grates on his every nerve; he can keep going. “Because I _know_ a lot of what I was taught was wrong, okay? And I know that that book is full of inaccuracies, and if knowledge is all that the Belmont line amounts to in the end, the only bit of us that gets handed down? I want to fix those problems. And I can’t without your help.”

“So you want to know more. About vampires. And ‘sulky half-vampires’?”

A sharp huff of a laugh. “Yeah.”

“You could have started with my favorite color, you know,” Alucard says, a solid attempt at annoyed indifference but there’s too much of a grin poking out one side of his mouth. “What I like to do on a Sunday. You didn’t have to jump straight to charnel houses and post-mortem bloodletting.”

“Hah. Well. Pardon me going out of order. But I’m going to guess black, and I have no idea but for damn sure it doesn’t involve going to church.”

“See, you know more about me than you think,” Alucard says, indulgent. He shuffles his shoulders under the coat, resettling it. “Though not so much with the black, these days. There was a time.”

“What happened?”

A shrug. “My tastes changed.”

“Oh, yeah? What to?”

Instead of an immediate reply, Alucard reaches across and takes Trevor’s chin in his hand, turns his head to face him.

“Uhhh,” Trevor says, intelligently.

“A certain shade of blue,” Alucard finally says, though, after a long moment of consideration. He taps a finger lightly under Trevor’s eye. Trevor is stock-still, a statue, because he can’t remember if Alucard has those talons out or not right now and doesn’t want to lose an eye finding out. “One that you and Sypha share in common.”

Trevor laughs, and pulls away, and brushes it off—because the alternative is being genuinely touched and that feels murky and dangerous right now, out from under that intimate bowl of false stars.

* *

“Speaking of Sypha.” Trevor says, as they’re getting close to the library again. The walk back seems to have been much shorter than the walk out; damn this castle and its shitty, impossible architecture.

“What about her?”

“If your old man really was storing blood somewhere, wouldn’t it have to be kept cold?”

“…of course.” Alucard seems a little thrown by the non-sequitur, but covers it well. “Else it would spoil.”

Trevor hms. “Do you think he would have used,” he asks, gesturing vaguely at the roof, the walls, encompassing the castle at large, “His science thing, or would magic have been easier?”

“I… don’t know, actually.” His eyes light up, glittering with gold. “But if it was magic—”

“—then Sypha could probably sniff it out like a bloodhound,” Trevor completes the thought, grinning.

* *

So they peel her away from her research, and she complains the whole way until they explain what they need her to do; then it becomes exciting, like a scavenger hunt, the three of them prowling the castle with their magician in the lead, dictating their every twist and turn.

And find it she does, in the end: a cavernous room behind a door that looked incapable of hiding such a space, filled with metal canisters and mist and squat, glass-faced metal cylinders with numbers printed in them. It’s spooky, and Trevor doesn’t know what any of these things are, but Sypha and Alucard seem to have a handle on it.

“I’ve never felt so much magic in one place,” she says, sounding vaguely overwhelmed, in the best of possible ways. “And all of it ice! The air is practically shaking with it.”

“There’s a lot here to keep cold,” Alucard says, sounding interested if not genuinely enthusiastic. He’s working the release on one of the canisters, twists a core out of the top of it like a giant screw. Peers inside, breathing in through his nose. “Well, there’s _something_ in there, anyway.” He reaches a hand in, pulls it back with one fingertip coated in red. Licks it off like it’s custard which, _gross_.

“Verdict?” Trevor asks, rather than actually say just how gross it is.

Alucard shrugs. “It’s blood. It’s kept well. It’s also human, which I’m not exactly thrilled about.”

Sypha sets a hand on Alucard’s arm; they both wait, in what they hope is supportive silence but might just be awkwardness, Trevor will freely admit.

“But,” Alucard says after a moment, reaching for the lid to replace it. “It’s not as though I can just give it back to whoever it was taken from and make everything better.”

“I don’t imagine they’re still alive anyway,” Trevor says.

“Yes, that’s… that was my _point_ ,” Alucard says, with a distinct note of _Are you stupid?_

And the simple, comfortable familiarity of it is _wonderful_. Trevor grins. “Might as well use it to keep this place defended, then. Turn all that misery into something good.”

Alucard nods, hesitantly. “I admit, I would like to avoid a repeat of yesterday.”

“Oh!” Sypha says, visibly brightening. “That reminds me; I’ve found something!”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Talking talking talking, and a serious attempt to solve any number of problems, with variable success. Trevor, baby, you're really growing up, but let's have a conversation about your adorable crush and how obvious it would be if these two weren't as big of dumbasses as you are.


	7. Chapter 7

*

So, this hallway: it has seventeen arches, sixteen sconces on the inside wall and four windows on the outside wall. The tile pattern on the floor repeats five and a half times—sloppy. It’s not an ideal echo chamber, far too straight and narrow, but their footsteps still ring out with impressive crispness, and the noise of it is the only thing keeping Adrian from completely focusing on his companions’ heartbeats.

There are two different kinds of hunger, he knows. There’s stomach-hunger, the same sort humans get, and that can be filled with fruit and eggs and spice rolls; his privilege as a half-breed. But there’s also blood hunger. And they should be nothing alike, but in so many ways, they are—denial first makes them both keener, then as the body adjusts to the deficit, the sensation dulls down and recedes into the background. Until the hunger is fed, of course, which only serves to make the body feel entitled, demanding, once again sharpening the edge of that blade.

And giving it just a drop, say what one could lick off of a finger—well, it’s like waking an empty stomach with ice water and giving it nothing more to contract around. It cuts.

They step from tile to carpet, silent. Their heartbeats fill his ears, and it cuts, it _cuts._

“So what exactly did you find?” he asks, struggling to hear himself over the pounding.

The thing is: he’s not in real danger of hurting them any more than a hungry human is in danger of chewing on his neighbor’s hand, no matter that it’s theoretically valid sustenance. He’s not an animal, and painful as hunger can be, its directives are not absolute. But it _is_ painful, made worse by his selfish, awful craving for both of them now that he’s had them, and if he can lose himself in conversation he might be able to ignore it until it fades.

He can acknowledge, now, that feeding from either of them had been a mistake.

He can also acknowledge that he had had little choice. It had been either Trevor’s blood or a meaningless death in the grass—Alucard of Wallachia, prince of the court of the night, stronger than any full-blooded vampire save Dracula himself, killed by a rank amateur with an extraordinary, stolen weapon and the devil’s own luck. It would have been a terrible ending to this story.

So no. There’d been no other choice. But there could be no denying it had whet that blade. It had also weakened his friends, stolen an entire evening in recovery. And it had taken his oath from him.

“…so of course I had to go looking for books on botanical science, but there weren’t very many of them and I wasn’t sure if they would have what I—Adrian?”

Oh. Sypha’s been talking, answering the question he’d put to her. “Sorry,” he says. “I was… somewhere else.”

“Were you,” Trevor says, low and suspicious, or perhaps just concerned. He’s still struggling to reframe some of these emotions. “Mind telling us where?”

“Portugal,” Adrian says, because never let it be said that he never learned the art of the casual lie. “Lovely this time of year. Anyway, yes Sypha, there’s a distinct dearth of material on plant life; it wasn’t a particular interest of his so it was only given token representation.”

Trevor sighs, very much not buying it, but lets it lie. Sypha’s brow pinches.

“Are you all right?” she asks, serious suddenly. “It’s not like you to just… drift off in the middle of a conversation.”

Adrian feels the grim smile on his face before he can stop it. Ha. Is he all right, she wants to know. In the past 24 hours, he has been: nearly disemboweled; forced to bite and feed from a human, something he had sworn he would never do and is very disappointed in himself for having enjoyed; _browbeaten_ into feeding from another human, also a more pleasant experience for him than it should have been; prodded by one of those humans into voluntarily unearthing new depths of emotional turmoil that might have been mocked in the past but was met now with only quiet respect—

—and he’s finding the subsequent desire to simply bury his face in their warmth and life and lap up everything that makes them beautiful to be _incredibly distracting_. And distressing. And _tempting,_ which is even more distressing.

So in summation: yes, as always. He’s fine.

“I’m fine,” he even says, and can almost convince himself it’s believable. He shoves down his awareness of their thrumming life; he forces it to be true. “Show us what you’ve found; I’ll pay attention this time.”

* *

“So, first of all,” Sypha begins, spreading the books out in front of her on the table she’d obviously needed to relocate to. “I’ve never been clear on this, Adrian. Are you sensitive to silver?”

“Exquisitely,” he says, eyes drifting over the books. One of those Gaelic texts, a very old volume in a language he can’t immediately place, a botanical chemistry reference, and… hm. A large book, closed and too far from him to see clearly, but something about it is familiar. “Embarrassingly so, in all honesty.”

“And garlic?”

He looks up from the books, narrows his eyes. Silver he’d expected as a part of this conversation; they’re talking about a knife. But garlic? “What does that have to do with this?”

“Humor me.”

Adrian takes a second to consider—to think about the smell of the stuff, whenever he’s encountered it. “Not… as such. I wouldn’t want to eat an entire bowl of it or rub it all over my skin—”

“Yeah, we don’t really want you doing those things either,” Trevor says, with a very punchable smirk.

Adrian quirks an eyebrow. “Afraid you’d have competition in smelling like the wrong end of a garbage pipe?”

“Hey,” Trevor says, mock-offended, “I’ll have you know, I’ve been bathing lately. Once a week at _least_.”

He has been, and it has made a difference; Trevor smells less like an unwashed drunkard with a dead rat in his hair and more like just a concentrated version of himself, these days. But the oldest weapons are the easiest to draw, and often the most entertaining. “I’ll believe that when I _see_ it. Do you realize—”

A sharp clap from Sypha, amplified by the sound of shattering ice. “Could you two _please_ stop with your… with your _argumentative flirting_ for five minutes and pay attention?”

Adrian blinks.

Trevor blinks, too. He looks mildly poleaxed.

“I…” Adrian starts, then shakes himself. “My apologies. I did promise to listen.”

“ _Yes_ , you did. _Garlic?_ ”

“Only a mild reaction,” he replies, rote, not wanting to piss Sypha off any further because: wow. “Nothing as dramatic as what you’d see from a full-blooded vampire.”

She nods, satisfied, not seeming surprised by either of his answers. She reaches for the closed book, spreads it open in front of both of them. A large, detailed drawing in brown ink covers one page: a Damascus longsword with a delicately twisted hilt and three large stones set into the blade. The handwritten text of the facing page describes the sword in detail: its origin, its maker, its last known location, its last known owner. “You will be happy to know that you were right, Trevor. There is in fact a picture book of all the known supernatural weapons—”

“—and also artifacts, devices, pieces of armor,” Adrian supplies, reaching out to run a finger down one of the pages. “Anything that could give a human an unexpected edge when facing a vampire.”

Sypha’s eyebrows go up. “You know this book?”

He feels a soft smile on his face, warm with something like nostalgia. “Yes, though I’d forgotten about it until just now. It’s one of my father’s.”

Now her eyes go completely wide, and she extracts her hands from under the book as quickly as she can without actually dropping it.

“No, no, it’s all right,” Adrian says, laughing a little because this is his fault. “I don’t think _this_ one is bound in human skin. It’s one of the earliest ones he started; that wasn’t a habit he picked up until later.” He pauses for a moment. Sniffs the air over the book; there’s a tang, metallic, stale. “However, I should warn you that it is most likely inked in blood.”

“That’s charming,” Trevor complains; he’d been touching the illustration, admiring the weapon’s lines. He does not continue doing so.

Adrian ignores him. “I’m honestly surprised at how well the oldest entries have held up,” he says, paging to the front of the book. “This was completed over the course of centuries. Was there something specific you found in here?”

Sypha nods, grinning with that glow of a question definitively answered. She flips through the book to where she’s inserted a scrap of paper as a marker.

And there, in beautifully rendered almost-sepia, is the blade that nearly took his life.

“Fiacail an Dragan,” he reads aloud from the top of the page. “Gaelic again?”

“Yes. Dragon’s Tooth.”

Hm. Forged in Airgialla, last known location listed as being in the possession of the Belmonts of Wallachia as of 1147. Not a surprise, considering that’s where the hunter had stolen it from. Original owner… “Trefor Gealbháin?”

“Wait,” Trevor says, jolting forward in the chair, suddenly interested again. “What?”

“The first owner of the knife,” Adrian says. He eyes Trevor sideways, suspicious. “That sounds familiar to me. Why does that sound familiar?”

Trevor’s leaned over the text, finger running down the page, distaste forgotten as he searches for the name in question. When he finds it, confirms what Adrian has said, he sits back with a hard sigh, rubs a hand over his face. “Probably because I was telling Sypha about him in the hold, back before we stormed the castle, and you pretty much never stop eavesdropping.” A slanted grin. “He came out here with Leon Belmont, few hundred years ago. Technically who I’m named after, I guess. I thought he was just a travelling companion, have no idea why he’d have had something like this.”

“Perhaps there was a reason your Leon chose to travel with him,” Sypha suggests.

“Yeah, I guess so. I just didn’t know they even _had_ hunters in the isles.” Trevor picks up the knife from the table in front of them, unsheathes it for the first time since yesterday. The blade is that unearthly white-pale of pure silver as he turns it in the light, except where it’s coated in blackened blood, burned onto it like a brand. Trevor balances it between two fingers, idly trying to find its center. “Wonder what makes it so nasty.”

“Everything, apparently,” Adrian says, reading further down the page to the rest of the description. “I have never seen such excess in a weapon. It was apparently not enough merely to consecrate it and make the blade from silver, they also quenched it in allium oil.”

“Exactly!” Sypha says, as if it were self-explanatory, but at Trevor’s confused look, she sighs and elaborates: “Allium is the oil found in garlic. It is very irritating, even to some humans.” She shoves that particularly ancient text over to him; he glances at it, rolls his eyes and pushes it to Adrian. Ah. Persian, then. Old Persian? Either way, obviously not something Trevor can read. “According to that book, garlic in general can make demons and vampires very ill, but garlic in a _wound_ can make that wound unhealable, more so if it’s been inflicted by silver. Which lines up with what your father wrote about this knife in particular.”

 _An inevitable and agonizing death, for those who should be deathless,_ the text reads, in the familiar elegant hand. _A wound that cannot heal, bleeding that cannot be staunched; we die as men, under the bite of this dragon. Tread with care._

“…but,” Trevor says, leaning away from where he’d been reading over Adrian’s shoulder; Adrian hadn’t even noticed him moving into his space. “You didn’t die.”

Adrian can feel a chill settling over him. “…no.”

“Because your reaction to garlic is not so extreme,” Sypha concludes, with that self-satisfied air that would have been grating on anyone else; on her, it feels earned. “The silver did its damage and the allium inhibited your healing at first, but you were able to overcome it.”

“Thank fuck,” he hears Trevor mutter under his breath, hand over his mouth muffling it. He looks genuinely shaken. “That sounds horrible.”

It does. It also sounds horribly _effective_. At killing vampires.

They’re still talking. There’s a rushing in his head, drowning them out.

And it hadn’t killed him, because…

“So it’s my human half that saved me,” Adrian hears himself saying, before he even has the words formed in his mind. He gives them a few seconds to settle, then pushes up out of the chair, takes a few unsteady steps toward the stacks behind them. He can feel something crawling up his throat, something that feels like strangulation, that tastes like sorrow. He chokes out a laugh. “It always is, isn’t it?”

“…Adrian? What's wrong?” Sypha voice sounds wavery, uncertain. Worried. Worried about the part of him that bleeds, that mourns for a human mother, that compliments her on her bread every morning. Worried about—

“…the only part of me worth saving.” He leans against the shelves, teetering on the edge of a patch of daylight, and he wishes he could just stop talking; they don’t need to hear this. He doesn’t even know where this is coming from. He can… he can pull himself together, excuse himself. Fall apart in the privacy of his room and sort it out there. Keep his dignity and keep this burden off of their shoulders; he’s taken so much from them already.

Sypha’s hand on his arm. Wait, no—it’s too heavy, too broad. “Never mind, I’ll just—” he says, straightening. “It’s fine, I’ll go—”  

“No,” says the owner of the hand, turning him back toward them; Trevor’s being careful, cautious, like he’s handling a wild creature. “That isn’t how it is.”

Adrian feels something strange and volatile bubble up out of the depths, like anger but coarser, rougher. “Oh, but it is, isn’t it?” he snaps, and he really, truly wishes he could stop talking. Stop _being here_ in entirety. Someone is going to get hurt, and he does not think he can stop it. “The only reason you ever tolerated a _fucking vampire_ in your camp, Belmont, was because the beast was half human.”

Trevor’s looking at him like he’s just grown another head. Not hurt, not even angry, just—confused.

“That’s unfair,” Sypha says, sharp. “You didn’t even explain that until—”

“Oh, he’d worked it out already. What else would have stayed his hand on that knife while you and I had our little conference?” His face feels wet. Why does his face feel wet? “He knew something wasn’t making sense. Too _human_ to kill outright.”

Sypha looks to Trevor; he gives an apologetic shrug, because yes, of course he’d figured it out—if not the specifics, then at least a suspicion. He’s a Belmont, studied in all things supernatural. How could he not have?

“That’s… not really the point,” Trevor says, still cautious, reaching to roll up a sleeve. “If I still had _any_ problem with that part of you, this wouldn’t be here.” He pulls the sleeve up to reveal the purpled mess of bruising on his arm, the two rough, scabby tears. It’s ugly, a testament to how much damage Adrian really had done in his desperation. It looks like an _animal_ bite.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Adrian says, and he can feel his anger wilting under the weight of the guilt. Finally. This is what he deserves to be feeling. He presses a fist to his chest, hunches forward over it, over the old scar; it feels like something is trying to escape. “You’d still be whole. Both of you. If I hadn’t been a selfish _monster_.”

“And you’d be dead,” Trevor says, stepping forward, right up into his space. He takes Adrian by the shoulders, forces him back to his full height. “Aluca— _Adrian._ Listen to me. You’d be dead because that’s the part of you that you _needed_. If someone had cut _me_ like that? There wouldn’t have been any coming back from it. Might be that your human blood is what made it so you _could_ heal, but it was the vampire in you that actually _did_ the healing. Without both of them, you would have died.”

Before he can stop up his mouth: “ _Then why can’t I mourn them both?”_

Silence, in response. Trevor doesn’t remove his hands, but he does soften his grip; Sypha adds another point of contact, taking his hand carefully.

“Why,” Adrian says, voice weakening rapidly, “do I only have tears for my mother? When I know I loved my father, I _know I did_.”

“I said it before,” Sypha says after a long moment, just as kind as he remembers her being in the aftermath of that horrible blaze. “And I’ll say it now. It’s all right to honor both sides of who you are. And it’s all right to mourn both of them, too. You don’t insult any of those who died or suffered by grieving for the family _you_ lost.”

“But the grief doesn’t come,” Adrian says, voice feeling paper thin. Sypha tugs on his hand, encouraging him down to the floor; Trevor follows them, one hand still clasped on Adrian’s shoulder. There’s something quiet and intimate about this space, tucked between the table and the shelves. “I’ve tried. It’s like I’ve forgotten everything.”

“I don’t think you have,” Trevor says, a quiet and guilty rumble. “I think we’ve just made you feel like you can’t talk about it. Like you’re not allowed to remember it.”

“Why don’t you tell us?” Sypha says, because stories are how she grew up communicating, loving, mourning, remembering. “We all know what happened during that year; tell us about _before_ that year.”

Adrian takes a deep, shuddering breath, smiling faintly; he hasn’t the slightest idea why.

* *

So: he tells them, and they listen, as intently as they did around that campfire near Argeș.

He tells them about growing up half in the castle and half at his mother’s clinic, about lessons and outings, about the first time he travelled with his father, to Switzerland one winter, where he had learned what real snow was about.

He tells them about the injured bat he’d found in the woods when he was ten, and how he’d brought it home sure his mother would have ideas for treating it but that his father would scoff at him bothering with a mindless creature; in the end, his mother had been terrified for him because of the horrible diseases bats apparently carry, and it had been his father who had sat with him up in the study, helping him fashion a bed from a fruit crate and teaching him the light sort of glamour that can be used on aggressive or frightened animals to keep them from attacking.

He tells them about trips to the night market that happened every few months in Târgoviște, and how when he’d been small enough, he’d had the best view of the festivities for miles, perched higher than any normal child would have dared.

He tells them about quiet moments, and loud moments, and furious moments where Adrian’s safety had been threatened by something or another, and the desperate time when he was freshly thirteen and his mother had become ill with something she’d caught from a patient; the patient died, and his father had been terrified, the texture of those days gritty and unreal under the searching light of memory. Adrian had been kept from her for nearly a month, so unsure were they as to the limitations of his heritage.

He tells them all of these things, and more, everything he can remember. By the time he’s run out of voice, the day is gone, the first stars starting to glimmer into existence through the nearest window—and he has found his tears.

* *

They bundle him into his bed, a gentle thing. There’s no pity in it.

“We’ll be here,” Sypha says, brushing his hair back with her hand. She’s already settled on the edge of the bed, and shoots a look across at Trevor; the hunter groans good-naturedly and sits down on the other side, toeing off his boots.

Sypha snuffs out the candle, wastes no time burrowing under the blanket, burrowing into his space; she tucks her head under his chin, drawing close. A moment later, there’s a broader warmth against his back, a little touch-and-go, a little hesitant.

“See?” Trevor’s voice, and Adrian can hear the idiotic grin in it. “We like both sides of you just fine.”

" _Trevor,_ " Sypha says, sharp; he can just about _hear_ her glaring.

“Oh, come on,” Trevor laughs. “I was trying to be nice.”

“You were _trying_ to be funny.”

“And what, exactly, is wrong with that?”

Trevor Belmont, last of the legendary hunters, making terrible jokes, laughing when he shouldn’t and not laughing when he should. _God, you still think you’re funny._ Bluster and buoyancy even in the face of his own terrible sadness; asking Adrian if _he_ was ready to face his father while standing in the ruins that all the Belmonts had burned to death in. Worried about _him._

And Sypha Belnades, so proud of her name and her people, endlessly strong, endlessly fierce, endlessly willing to fight for the people she’s chosen to protect but there had been no other Belnades in that tribe, had there? No other masters of magic. Who had her parents been? How old was she, when she lost them? Sypha, spinner of tales and worker of wonders the likes of which the world has never seen.

Both of them: burning so brilliantly, against the inky black backdrop of loss.

“How do either of you do it?” he asks, quietly, interrupting them.

What feels like an eternity, drifting by in the darkness.

“It gets easier,” Sypha says. “Not better, just… easier.”

“Stops punching you in the face for no reason,” Trevor adds, levering himself up on his elbow. He sounds distant, like he’s talking to someone farther away than either of them. “Eventually it’s only there if you go digging for it. So you stop digging for it.”

Adrian can hear their heartbeats, slow and easy, whispering against the blankets like the breeze in the trees outside. Can hear his own, blending in with that quiet susurrus as if it belongs.

“How long does that take?” he asks.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Trevor breathes; the bed shifts as he settles back down, one arm falling gracelessly over Adrian’s waist. “Tell you what: I’ll let you know.”

* *

For a long time, he drifts—for hours and hours. He’s wrung out and raw, and thoughts aren’t being entirely reliable right now, so he tries to focus on sensations: the magician’s tight, wiry frame, all ferocity and warmth, tucked up against his chest, her hands lying curled in the blanket between them and her short, dense hair brushing over his chin. The heavier weight of the hunter against his back, languid and coiled, burning like a furnace. There’s breath against his collarbone, against the back of his neck.

This feels like an honest space. Sleeping bodies don’t lie, don’t have any reason to lie. If they cling, if they hold and pull close and murmur out the nonsense of their dreams with no hesitation or shame, it is because that is what they want to do.

When Trevor and Sypha had first returned to the castle, it had been the beginning of sweet cherry season, spring just starting to tip its way into summer, midday becoming syrupy with heat in the same way that mornings and evenings eventually would. Now the mulberries are hanging dark and heavy, and the first apples and pears are ripening in their trees along the river. The sugary smell of them diffuses through the cool early morning air, and the breeze that comes through Adrian’s bedroom’s window is gentle now but carries a promise of bluster and rain and cooler weather before long. They will have to find heavier blankets, he thinks. They will have to find another place to store their lies.

“Something else,” Trevor mutters from behind him, tucking up closer against Adrian’s back as a particularly cool gust circles the room. But he says nothing more for a long moment, and Adrian is loath to ask after whatever he’d been about to say in case the man had just been talking in his sleep.

In the end, there’s no need. “You’re not just… two things mashed together, you know,” Trevor mumbles, voice slurred into Adrian’s hair as he finally retrieves the thread of his own thoughts. “Not just… half this and half that, like you’re sewn up down the middle. You’re—” A hard yawn. “…something different.”

Something different; something strange, unnatural. He’s never met another. Because hunters killed them all, or because they truly aren’t supposed to exist?

A sigh against his chest, as if reading his dark thoughts. Sypha lifts her hands into the space between them; in the pre-dawn light, it looks like she’s spinning shape from shadows. Then there’s a glow of blue and gold, and she has the tiniest bit of ice, the tiniest flame. She brings them together and they both vanish into a wisp of steam, floating lazily toward the ceiling.

Adrian reaches a hand up on impulse, twines his fingers through the plume.

“Could you take the ice back out of the steam?” Sypha asks, quietly. “Or separate out the fire?”

“No,” he cedes, still watching it curl around his hand.

“And yet,” she says, dropping her head back down to burrow against him. “It could not exist without them both.”

“It’s a combination of them,” Adrian muses, beginning to understand. “But not simply the _summation_ of them.”

A breath of silence, then a laugh against his hair.

“That was really good, Sypha,” Trevor says, laughter trailing off. “I was probably just going to blather on about chicken stew or something.”

“I am sorry for stealing your opportunity to be profound.” Sypha doesn’t sound sorry, is grinning against Adrian’s shirt. The air feels lighter, all at once. “You could always just _make_ chicken stew for us instead.”

“Get me a chicken from the village and maybe I will.”

“More likely you’ll forget, and we’ll just have a chicken running about, soiling things,” Adrian puts in.

“It can hang out with Shitbutt. He needs a friend his size anyway.”

“His name,” Sypha says, sounding mildly offended on the poor dog’s behalf. “Isn’t _Shitbutt_.”

“It kind of is,” Trevor snickers from behind him, for those few seconds sounding all of twelve. Then he sobers. “But seriously, Alucard. _Adrian._ Whatever you like. You’re not just a… a tainted human, or a watered-down vampire, okay? You’re something bigger than that. You’re… your own thing.” A breath of pause, then another. “…and you’re still kind of a bastard sometimes, but there’s nothing _selfish_ about you.”

The arm around his waist tightens fractionally, the hunter’s fingers curling over his newest scar. Sypha’s gone quiet; there’s a tension in the air like the moment before spring ice breaks up.

“So don’t… look,” Trevor continues, sounding halfway like he doesn’t know what he’s saying. He stifles another yawn, pushes forward. “Don’t worry about… whatever it is you feel like doing. As long as everyone’s okay with it, then I figure no one’s getting hurt, or taken advantage of or… yeah? So it’s fine.”

“Just because you want or benefit from something,” Sypha clarifies, because she apparently speaks half-asleep-Trevor and is willing to translate. “It doesn’t mean you’re being selfish. Not if it’s freely given.”

 _Would it help if it was giving_ , he hears Trevor ask, under that dome of dark and stars, _and not just taking?_ And he hadn’t had an answer then. He might, now.

“But if you ever bite me _that hard_ again,” Trevor says now, half laughing, “I will punch you in your fucking teeth.”

Adrian presses his eyes closed. He can feel a welling there, would probably be spilling tears if he hadn’t already cried himself dry. He takes up Trevor’s hand in one of his, Sypha’s in the other, draws them both to his mouth, pressing a single kiss across both their knuckles. “This is fine?” he asks, breathing in the mingled scent of them.

“It is,” Sypha answers, quiet.

“Mmf,” Trevor burbles affirmatively against his hair.

Adrian breathes them in again, lingering.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So normally I use these notes to try to be funny, but this isn't a very funny chapter. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to clarify some points of interpretation.
> 
> Trevor and reading. I'm of the camp that interprets 'can't read or understand magic' as meaning 'can't read the esoteric texts that involve magic' but can still likely read, at bare least, common Romanian. This is not just me having modern literacy-fetishizing sensibilities; the way he spoke about the descriptions his great-grandfather WROTE about Dracula's castle makes me think he must have read them. If not, I feel like he would have probably emphasized the oral nature of the transmission given that he was talking to Speakers at the time.
> 
> I have no idea what goes into bladesmithing; I know you can quench with oil instead of water but I have no clue if it would have worked with a silver blade or not. I also brazenly invented a last name for the enigmatic Trefor, with no guarantees that it's period-appropriate. And I am assuming that 'Celt' circa 1000 AD would have referred to Ireland/the British Isles, since most of the people called Celts in mainland Europe had been conquered and assimilated by that time.
> 
> I don't know what the fuck kinds of fruit they had in Romania in the 1400s. I just tried to avoid stuff that comes from the Americas.
> 
> I tend to imagine dhampir powers/weaknesses as a mishmash of genetic combinations and reassortments, so that likely no two follow exactly the same rules. Alucard got the silver sensitivity in spades, not so much with the garlic, and has basically no particular sun sensitivity beyond a mild droopiness and the fact that he's got about as much melanin as a snow-cone.


	8. Chapter 8

*

Trevor’s dreams are sweet and confused and suffused with midsummer heat; he wakes up feeling like he’s spent the night crawling inside of someone, breathing into their blood and winding his hands up inside their ribcage and pressing his fingers to every spot where the integrity between them breaks down, plugging the leaks, keeping all the light and beauty inside where it belongs. He wakes with a gasp between his teeth, with the feeling of flame licking over his skin.

Alucard and Sypha are still dead to the world, peaceful, curled into one another just as they fell asleep. It’s mid-morning, probably. His hand is still twined loosely in Alucard’s grasp, the coolness of it a balm against the heat in his bones.

He closes his eyes against the sunlight, against the rush of tenderness and the lightheadedness that comes with it, with this incomprehensible intimacy. He considers shifting back away from Alucard, to spare him the first-thing-in-the-morning awkwardness that comes with a male bedmate, but to hell with it—they’ve seen each other at their worst and their best at this point, and if that range can’t support a little earthy reality then he would be very disappointed.

“God, your hair smells good,” he mutters, not fully intending it be out loud or even certain that it is.

“That would be _soap_ ,” comes the predictable response, wobbling between sleepiness, affection, and mild disdain. “Exotic, I know.”

Trevor laughs, pulls closer. Drifts back off.

* *

They sleep and wake, on and off, until it’s at least noon. It’s been a long few days.

Then they stumble downstairs together, have breakfast, a lazy group effort at fried eggs and toast and more of that over-tart currant jam. Sypha puts a stone mug in Alucard’s hands and sends him off to the storeroom for, what, second breakfast? Whatever euphemism they end up coming up with for _he’s going off to a freaky ice-magic room to drink cold blood from a metal tube_.

But he’s back before they realize he’s gone, infinitely more energetic. Still stuck in his persistent sleep-haze, Trevor thinks that maybe he wants to hit him. Or kiss him? Or hell, _both._ It’s confusing. It’s been confusing for a while, but a sort of walled-off confusing, and it’s like last night swung a door wide open and let all the confusing just wander into the parlor to hang out with the dog.

Which is dead. Because of course it is. Trevor presses his forehead to the table.

Cool fingers settle into his hair, ruffle it encouragingly.

Trevor groans, lets it trail off into a harsh laugh. “What the hell are we doing?” he mumbles, wonderingly, a little awed. He hears Alucard chuckle to himself, feels Sypha lean in and press a kiss to the top of his head, right between Alucard’s fingers.

“Something worthwhile, hopefully,” Alucard says, slightly-sharp fingernails raking gently over his scalp. It feels incredible, an unspeakable luxury: touch for the sole purpose of soothing, of pleasure. Trevor can remember the last time someone touched him like this—Sypha, in that awful, lonely dungeon in Braila, when every stolen moment could have been the last and urgency imbued every contact with an unsatisfying furtiveness—but it’d been too long before that and has been too long since.

He turns his head on the table, looks the dhampir over appraisingly. He’s as rumpled as they all are, with a remarkable case of pillow-hair, but the look on his face… “…you seem better.”

“Than yesterday? That wouldn’t be much of a feat.” His expression turns inward for a moment, laced with guilt, and it’s like he’s about to say something, then reconsiders. “It’s remarkable how heavy a weight can become without ever really announcing its presence.”

“You were the only one who did not notice it was there,” Sypha says. She’s come around the table to press a matching kiss, equally chaste, to his temple; Alucard closes his eyes, a quiet smile lighting up in response. His hand stills in Trevor’s hair.

“I suppose I can at least credit myself, then,” he says, looking up to meet Sypha’s gaze where she hovers at his shoulder, “with choosing unusually perceptive allies.”

“’Allies’?” she teases.

“Friends, then,” he cedes, honeyed eyes glinting as they swing back in Trevor’s direction, and Trevor thinks: _Maybe more than that, before too much longer._ He has not, admittedly, had a lot of friends, but he’s pretty sure cuddling in bed and kissing each other’s hands with heart-shattering tenderness is a little outside the usual purview.

Does he say any of that? No. Because, as usual: if it’s not hitting monsters with sticks…

“It’s not just vanished, that weight,” is what he actually says, sarcasm filling the gap where courage has deserted him. He pulls his arms up onto the table, pillows his head in them. “Not that easily. Don’t start the post-mortem just yet.”

“I know. But now that I know its shape, its distribution, I can… change how I carry it, I suppose.”

Sypha leans against Alucard’s back, arms thrown around his neck. “You will have our help with that,” she says. “You aren’t alone.”

_You aren’t alone._ God, people talk about those other three little words, but they’re worth a wool overcoat in Hell compared to this: _You aren’t alone._ It’s what Sypha had wanted to hear, back in the shadows of Greşit; it’s the one thing that might have saved Trevor from the self-destructive dance his life became, had one single person been willing or even able to say it to that lost boy scrabbling in the ruins, grey with the ashy remains of his own life:

_You aren’t alone_.

“Never again,” Trevor finds himself saying; the words surprise him a little, coming out as they are without any chance to think about them, but improvising has always been his fallback and he knows when to sit back and trust his instincts. “Not while we’re still kicking around, anyway.”

Which may not be too terribly long, given the state of the world and just how many things want to kill them all, but never mind that. There’s still a terrible softness to it when Alucard trails his fingers from where they rest in Trevor’s hairline down to his chin, then leans in to mouth at the corner of his jaw, completing the circle.

It feels cool and shocking, like the still, breath-stealing instant after a too-near lightning strike—and all at once, Trevor has had it with all of this innocent, careful gesturing.

“Ah, fuck, we’re doing this,” he says, and it seems that all the courage he couldn’t find in his tongue has been pooling in his hands, coiling in the sinews there; before he can think twice about it he’s reaching to grasp Alucard by the back of his neck and draw him in for a proper kiss.

For a split second, there’s no response, and Trevor is sure he’s fucked this up. Then Alucard leans in hard, and it’s warm and sharp and just a little bit dangerous; he tastes like a punch in the mouth, but also like the tartness of the jam, and the alchemy of that is intoxicating in its own weird, fucked up way.

When he breaks away, Trevor’s pulling at breath through lips that feel raw and bitten, a tiny split angry and sore under his searching tongue, and for a moment, all either of them can do is stare.

Then Sypha, who’d been along for the ride by virtue of being slung ‘round Alucard’s shoulders like a particularly heavy, bony cloak, raises an eyebrow at him, and.

And sure, they’ve touched each other in desperate moments and told each other most everything but they’ve never done anything this genuinely intimate; he’s never felt so much like he _belongs_ with or to someone, her or anyone else, and when she reaches out with hands that had been clasped over Alucard’s heart to guide Trevor to her, all he can think is _God, I love them both so much_.

It shouldn’t be a shock, but it is; it’s wandered in with all of the confusion to sprawl itself across the floor in front of him, familiar and unfamiliar, surprising and inevitable and undeniable. And if he doesn’t know for sure what that word even means or how he can possibly apply it to two people at once, he at least knows what it _doesn’t_ mean: it doesn’t mean they’ll never fight again, or that he’ll never get fed up with Sypha’s coy smugness or Alucard’s casual insults or either of their self-sacrificing streaks, terrifying him down to the core whenever they surface. It doesn’t mean they’ll stop badgering him to take more baths or to behave more like the adult he never properly learned how to be, and it doesn’t mean any of them will hold anything back when they disagree and lives are on the line—nor should they. There will still be bad days mixed in with the good, and secrets and things that aren’t said, because none of them are stupid enough to think that loving makes complicated things simple.

He knows it doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, either. But fuck it. They were never going to die old anyway.

As it turns out, magic feels like ice on the lips, tastes like flame on the tongue, shoots through the body like anticipation with a biting undercurrent of terror—and that’s nothing compared to watching Sypha turn Alucard’s face toward her and lean in to brave that mouth, born for violence but so desperate in this moment to be gentle.

Outside, the sun hits its zenith, starts to fall.

* *

* *

They spend the afternoon doing normal things—taking the dog down into the overgrown, feral orchards for a runaround; clearing debris from a random section of the castle they discover entirely by an accident of navigation and geometry that Trevor is calling The Spooky Staircase Double Reach-around Waltz; considering options for dinner, and whether there is in fact time before the market shuts down for Sypha to go and get them a chicken. All the while, the air between them feels heavy with anticipation and promise, for the future that seems, so suddenly, to be possible—a future in which Alucard is not so haunted, in which Sypha is not so much an outsider everywhere she goes, in which Trevor is not so goddamned _alone,_ and can actually admit that that’s what he _wants_. A someday place, almost a fantasy, where they can all be themselves without fear.

Waking up that morning, Trevor had been unsure where the next night would find them; the closeness had been nice, had been well more than nice, but it had also resulted from circumstances he can’t in good conscience hope for a repeat of.

By the time the night is winding on and the candles burning down, the flickering light picking out the shadows in deep blue and delicate gold, it feels completely natural to just pile into Alucard’s bed once again, tangling together against the increasingly cool evening air—and again and again, every night from now until they’ve gone to dust.

* *

If Alucard had become a scrap of himself in their absence, had been winnowed down to a shadow by all of the ghosts and the pain and the guilt, and by the hunger that gnawed at his soul as surely as it gnawed at his bones—well, they watch day by day as that shadow fills out, gains back its substance and its strength, starts to become the powerful figure they remember. To an outside observer, this well-fed and proud creature now stalking the halls of the castle would be immediately recognizable as an apex predator held in perfect, vise-like self-control—a lion with a man’s head in his mouth, choosing not to bite down, not because he’s been broken or trained but because this crazy, suicidally courageous prey creature is too novel and fascinating to simply kill.

That is, probably, what the rest of vampire society thinks is going on—those that still live, and have any reason to know what goes on in Dracula’s old keep.

But there is more to recovery than just feeding the body, and the days are still warm but Trevor knows there will be snow on the ground before Alucard stops waking in the darkness with heartbreak lurking in his eyes, before his clinging has less to do with desperation and more to do with desire—before Trevor can shout down into that midnight well and hear something other than his own distorted voice echoing back out of it.

Still: he knows there’s something down there now, knows it as he watches Alucard uncurl himself in the morning light, as he watches the pain of waking transform into the warm awareness of what he’s waking _to;_ watches it happen more quickly every day, until the pain is almost just a trailing part of the dream and nothing more.

* *

This… courtship? Dalliance? of theirs seems to want to move at its own pace, which has Trevor disoriented. Not frustrated, not impatient, just—disoriented. He hasn’t had much call for complicated relationships in the past, or even simple ones; he can count on both hands how many people he’s slept with over the years, but he doesn’t need all of his fingers to do it. And while there’s been the odd bit of life-affirmation-in-the-face-of-certain-doom in there, it’s mostly been cold and lonely nights in taverns he can never remember the name of afterward, attraction acknowledged immediately and mutually as the half-drunk, half-blind thing it is and something done about it before they have the chance to second-guess themselves. Happens quickly, over quickly, not particularly satisfying in an existential sense, but no regrets for either party. Maybe it’s sad, but that’s what he understands.

This slowly growing, unspooling thing between the three of them? It’s different, and he can say with certainty that his life is better for it being here, that he can feel it down to the soles of his feet even when it’s just a rainy afternoon sitting down by the fireplace, his two scholars curled together on one of those too-ornate couches with a book between them and the steel of a blade slowly growing razor-keen beneath his hands. They don’t even have to be touching him; the glowing morning-after feeling never leaves him, no matter that all they’ve done every night so far is kiss and bite at each other’s mouths, and press together for the warmth and for the contact, and spill secrets in the dark.

It’s good. There’s no denying that. But he doesn’t understand it—doesn’t understand why this feels like _enough_ , at least for now.

Or why, if this _is_ enough, it feels like a completely natural progression of things when he wakes up one cool morning to find Sypha and Alucard devouring each other, Alucard sprawled on his back and Sypha rocking against him with a languid lack of urgency. She doesn’t have him inside her—thank god they haven’t left him _that_ far behind in this thing—but she moves as if she does, grinding against his hip, sheet shifting to show a soft expanse of bare thigh.

There’s a smear of blood on the skin there, and two reddened, punched-out little imperfections, right where the pulse runs heavy and hot. Trevor swallows as understanding crashes in; he knows what _he_ would have done next, had he ended up with his mouth on the crease of her thigh like that, and Sypha has the distinctly flushed, lazy look of someone going back for seconds.

So: this is new. He closes his eyes. The mental image alone is shattering, takes his breath away.

When he opens them again, Sypha’s looking straight at him, her color high, motion slowing. Alucard too, his gaze all gold and wilderness.

Trevor shakes his head warningly. He can feel how wide his eyes are, how awed he must look. Good god, they’re beautiful. “Don’t stop on my account.”

Sypha tsks, and leans over to take his sleep-sticky mouth, bracing herself with a hand beside his head. There is never a time, he thinks, when she doesn’t taste like magic and ferocity, and the tingling runs straight through to his toes.

“We were only occupying ourselves, waiting for you to wake up,” she says, tumbling over him to land on his other side, giving a self-satisfied little bounce. “ _We’ve_ already had our fun today, but you seemed determined to sleep until lunch time.”

Already had their fun _today_? What the fuck, since when is this a thing that happens? “I didn’t realize there was an _event_ I needed to be up for,” Trevor says, narrowing his eyes suspiciously at Alucard.

“And what exactly is that look for?” Alucard asks, vaguely defensive, and he looks so well-kissed it’s almost obscene. “It was Sypha who decided it was time to up the ante, as it were.”

“We have been dancing around it for too long,” she says, matter of fact, “and I was tired of waiting for you two to figure that out. If you haven’t noticed, it is getting colder at night; soon we will need more than blankets and body heat to keep us warm.”

And it sounds so _practical_ that he could almost buy it, except for the way she’s grinning at him, her expression just daring him to call her on her bullshit.

“Can’t argue with that,” he says instead, and indeed he can’t—nor does he argue when Alucard shifts to sit up and, in a movement too swift to track, is suddenly arched above him, ranging over him with that same predatory grace that Trevor remembers from their first meeting.

And… oh. Oh, hell. Reframing that night now, in this context, he suddenly realizes how _charged_ that moment had been; he’d been too distracted by duty at the time to notice the way Alucard had been basically dripping raw sexuality all over the fucking vault. Maybe it’s a vampire thing, triggered by hunting behavior? Maybe he’d just been in that coffin for too damn long?

Either way, Jesus. This really _has_ been a long time coming.

“This is familiar,” Trevor says, his usual penchant for understatement fully intact.

There’s a fierce glimmer in the yellow eyes as recognition sparks, and Alucard sinks closer and lower to him. “Did you mean it,” he says, eyes half-lidded with some warm, heavy promise, “when you said this side of me doesn’t frighten you anymore?”

Trevor lifts both eyebrows, challenging. “You never _scared_ me, you arrogant shit.”

Alucard draws his lip back in a half-grin, half-snarl. “You forget, Belmont,” he says, and these days? The last name is _clear_ tip-off that this is a game. “I can _smell_ fear. Not now, perhaps, but that night under Greşit? Half a breath from having your throat ripped out? You _reeked_ of it.”

Okay, fine. It’s one thing to posture about being the great Trevor Belmont, Unafraid of Dying, but he’s fairly sure anyone would have tripped a vampire’s fear-sniffing snout under those circumstances. Doesn’t mean he has to _admit_ it. “You sure I didn’t just plain reek? Hadn’t had a bath in about a month at that point.”

“You really did,” Sypha puts in. “Like a dead horse.”

“Hey!”

“That has been left in the sun for _weeks_.”

And for a second it seems like Alucard’s going to keep up the act, but then it falls apart and he’s laughing, a little helplessly. “Yes, fine, you also just plain reeked. You’re impossible, do you realize that?”

“What, because I’m not playing along with your spoooooky vampire routine?”

Alucard narrows his eyes, sets his jaw, like he’s going to just keep trying until Trevor gives him the reaction he wants. Which, hilarious.

“Look,” Trevor says, reaching up to idly thread his fingers through that heavy, luxurious fall of hair; it’s gorgeous like this, with the sun shining through it. Silvered gold. “You can pretend to be a scary predator if it’s what gets you going, but I have it on good—and absolutely anonymous—authority that you’ve never once put your teeth in _anyone’s_ neck.” A sharp laugh, not unkind. “What were you even planning to do down there, if I’d pushed you? Just wing it?”

“I wasn’t planning to do it at all,” Alucard says, tossing a vaguely betrayed look at Sypha, who bites her lip to stifle a laugh. “Since you were most likely the hunter of the prophecy, no matter how obnoxious you were being.”

But before Trevor can react to any of that, there are deeply clawed fingers at his cheek and jawline, digging in, shoving his head hard to one side.

“But if you’d like me to ‘wing it’,” Alucard whispers into his ear, all melodrama again, “I can do that.”

And damn him, because this should still be just obvious theatrics but he’s somehow hit all the right notes, found just the right threatening tone and put just the right amount of force behind that grip to get Trevor’s pulse to spike, to make him catch his breath behind his teeth. Distantly, he hears Sypha make an appreciative noise, but his world has suddenly narrowed down to claws and teeth and his own hammering heart.

“Ah, there it is,” Alucard purrs, leaning in to lick a wet line up his throat, catching the skin with just the slightest hint of _sharp_. His other hand has settled over Trevor’s heartbeat, the rasping drag of a single claw over his breastbone, pushing him back to the bed where he’s started to arch into the touch. “You’re either afraid or turned on, Belmont. Which is it?”

_Oh, give me strength._ “Which do you _fucking think_ it is?” Trevor growls.

“Mm. I asked you a question, before. Did you _mean_ what you _said?_ ”

“I did.”

“So you don’t think I’m just another vampire?”

Trevor tries to shake his head. He can’t, not under the strength of that grip.

“How is this different,” Alucard continues, dragging his fangs right against Trevor’s pulse, “than what a vampire does?”

A blast of heat hits Trevor low in the gut, blooming out to his fingertips, to his toes. He sucks in a ragged breath.

_Because I’ve been this close to a lot of vampires and I’ve never felt anything but cold._

_Because my family taught me seventeen ways to break free from this hold in an instant and I don’t want to, not even a little._

_Because you want this for me as much as you want it for you._

_Because…_

“Because it is, okay?” Trevor mumbles, pressing his eyes closed because if he keeps watching Alucard, even from the corner of his eye like this, he’s going to do something really embarrassing. Like start humping the bastard’s leg, maybe. “You’re just… not like that. It’s not complicated.”

Since he isn’t looking, he doesn’t expect it when a drop of something warm and wet hits the side of his face; Alucard’s body language changes completely, all the predatory tension shaking out of him. The claws dull back down to ordinary fingers, and the pressure they keep on his jawline is suddenly tender, willing to yield at any moment.

Off to the side he can’t see, Sypha’s warm hand folds into his, gives it a squeeze.

“Trevor," he hears, a low, gentle whisper against his throat. "Do you want this?”

And damn him, he does—he doesn’t know _why_ , because it for damn sure doesn’t feel good and he’s never been into pain, or at least, not pain like _that_. But he can’t remember the last time he felt so _connected_ to anyone, all tangled up in life and death with them, and his better judgement may normally steer him away from that kind of vulnerability but his better judgement has _firmly_ checked out, at this point.

Alucard is still as a statue, waiting for his response. He’s given Trevor one last easy out, because it’s one thing to help heal a fallen ally, but if it’s really possible for the dead to lose rest over what their descendants do, no one in that cemetery will ever sleep again after this.

“Yeah,” Trevor says—because right now, he could not give less of a shit. They’re dead, they had their lives; this is his. Let them spin. “ _Fuck._ Yeah, I do.”

A hard, bruising kiss to his throat, then—enough to make his toes curl, if he’s honest, and if Alucard hadn’t chosen that moment to press his thigh down between Trevor’s he would have gone looking for the friction himself, shame be damned. Then he gasps, jerking against Alucard’s leg, as the sharp spike of pain lights up in his senses. It’s there and gone again—no sickening, tearing agony, no fangs plunging to the marrow. Just a shallow bite, then the feeling of heat and wetness running down the skin of his throat in a sinuous thread.

Alucard ducks to catch it on his tongue, sweeping it up until he’s back at the source; the entire path burns like fire on his skin. Sypha is kissing the palm of his hand, now, fingers trailing up his arm to tease at the fresh pink scar where his first bite had been, and the _sound_ Alucard is making… Trevor can’t even identify it. It’s like some dizzy, muddy mix of hedonistic pleasure and innocent comfort, pure and profane and unbearably intimate.

He suddenly can’t deal with this anymore, and he reaches out to grab at more of Sypha, to drag her in against him and shore up his own courage with her solidity, her warmth. He hears himself whimper.

“It’s all right,” she soothes, “Relax,” sounding a little confused because no, it really shouldn’t hurt anymore. But it isn’t pain that has him reaching for her. The wounds are such tiny things, Trevor can tell—probably won’t even scar—but there should have been nothing enjoyable about the bite itself, and yet that bright little shock of sensation had still shot straight to his core, pure unadulterated arousal. And on top of that, Alucard is sucking on his skin for every drop it’s willing to give up, so desperate just for the taste of him, and that is nearabout pulling him out of his mind.

In short: Trevor Belmont is kind of losing his shit.

Then Alucard gives one last lick and stops, pulls his mouth away; he breathes lightly over the spot, and even that is almost too intense to bear.

“…is that seriously all you want?” Trevor asks after a moment, voice shaky, jumping to sarcasm because, okay, there are some things here he does not want to look at too closely.

Alucard rumbles a quiet laugh against his skin.

“I think,” Sypha says, smushed up against his side, “he is just trying to avoid getting ‘punched in his fucking teeth’.”

“I am,” Alucard says, leaning back a bit, releasing his hold on Trevor’s jaw; all that lovely pressure between his legs disappears too, and Trevor could just about scream. “And I’m also not starving anymore. But there’s something…”

“Something more important than the fact that you’re a fucking cocktease?”

Alucard doesn’t rise to the bait, just licks his lip briefly, and considers. “There’s something odd about the taste of your blood. But I can’t pin it down.”

Trevor feels Sypha’s face go all pinchy with concern, but no—he gets it now. For all his supposed sophistication, Alucard is not subtle, and Trevor smirks, willing to play along. “Let me guess, you need another taste to figure it out.”

“That would be helpful, yes,” Alucard says, already moving back in, with none of the faux-menace or even the subsequent tenderness from before. Waits for Trevor to nod in agreement before giving him another sharp nip, seemingly all business; he’s holding up the ‘oh I must have more of your blood FOR SCIENCE’ act incredibly well.

But when he leans back out again, Alucard _still_ doesn’t look anything but thoughtful, running his tongue over his teeth, eyes unfocusing as he turns his attention inward. He shakes his head, frustrated. “No. I still can’t work out what it is.”

“Wait,” Trevor says, because he’s suddenly realizing that maybe this isn’t just a gimmick to get more access to his neck. “You’re being serious.”

“Of course I… what did you think I was doing?”

Oh, shit. _Shit_. Trevor stomps down on a sudden rush of panic, hard. “Okay, so… when you say ‘wrong’, do you mean like, magical wrong, or sick wrong, or cursed wrong, or—”

“I didn’t say ‘wrong’, I said ‘odd’.” Alucard shifts over him, pushing a hand back through Trevor’s unkempt hair. “And I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. I seem to have spoiled the mood.”

“You didn’t notice it before?” Sypha asks, voice laced with worry.

Alucard shakes his head, looks over at her. “I was a bit busy trying not to die, at the time. And whatever it is, it’s very subtle.”

Then he looks down at Trevor, who is still _a little fucking freaked out,_ thank you very much, and gives him a half-smirk. “Oh, stop looking so grave. If it were something significant, I’m sure I’d recognize it. For all we know it might just be some sort of hereditary peculiarity.”

“A Belmont thing,” Sypha says, contemplative. “Perhaps one of your ancestors was cursed by the faeries! Or was a werewolf or…” She waves one hand. “Something.”

Trevor rolls his eyes. “Yeah, think I would have heard about it if something like that had happened,” he says, because his family was a lot of things—including some things he hadn’t known about, like fucking black magicians apparently, and hey, maybe _that’s_ what’s going on—but shoddy record-keepers they were not. Still, the idea’s worth a laugh, which is probably what she’d been going for.

“I really wouldn’t be—I shouldn’t have worried you,” Alucard says, finally. He reaches down to smooth his palm over Trevor’s scarred belly, low and heavy and insistent, before pushing the band of his trousers aside and taking him in hand; Trevor sucks in a hard breath. This is far more, ah, _direct_ than anything else they’ve done to this point, and it’s _fine,_ he just hadn’t been expecting it. “Allow me to make it up to you?”

And it’s tempting, _so_ tempting, to just nod and let him go about it, but Trevor can still feel that seed of unease in the back of his mind, unfurling tender shoots, wiggling into cracks and crevasses, and he needs more than just an ice-cold fucking hand-job right now. “You can,” he says, “but I’m not letting you change the subject, I need to know what’s—”

“Imagine being in a field full of flowers,” Alucard cuts him off, and Trevor does, even though he has no damned idea where Alucard is going with this; it’s too hard to think up a solid protest while the bastard’s touching him so maddeningly. “All of them strong-smelling, overpowering, and you know them all by heart.”

Okay. Done. Are Alucard and Sypha in the field with him? That’s kind of important, at the moment.

“But somewhere in that field is a single, different plant, with its own scent,” Alucard continues, leaning in close again. “And it’s familiar, it’s so familiar, but it’s so drowned out and lost in the sea of stronger smells that you can’t tease it out. You can barely tell it’s there at all.”

“…okay…”

“So,” Alucard says, smiling against the skin of Trevor’s throat, “in the end, you decide to just enjoy the flowers for what they are, and stop trying to figure everything out.”

Then he licks hard against one of the bites that Trevor can feel is still seeping, and moves his hand just _so_ —a twinned burst of pleasure-pain that sends him spinning, and Trevor comes with this image in his mind: the two of them pressing him back into that field of flowers until he’s sure his bones are going to dissolve into the earth, reaching in and pulling him out of himself, the red heads of poppies hovering around their sun-silhouetted faces and the taste of something strange and terrifying on his tongue.

*

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOW DO EMOTIONALLY MATURE INTIMACY
> 
> Also: Hm. Weird, huh?


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, so, sorry for the wait. First it was that I decided I was going to play through SotN again like a giant idiot (though it did bear fruit in this chapter in an entirely silly way), and then the content that I wanted in this chapter decided to sprawl out to the length of two chapters, which means I had to figure out where to cut it in half. Which is why this chapter seems heavy on the porn and the next one probably will have none at all. But things happen in the order they happen in.
> 
> Regularly scheduled entertaining notes at the bottom, as always.

* 

Outside, a mid-afternoon rainstorm has blown up, droplets lapping quietly against the stone sill of the window. An occasional lazy roll of thunder, somewhere far away. The air smells like green wood and cool, wet earth.

It’s warm under this blanket, though; there’s body heat enough to beat back the damp. Adrian is lying here with his fierce beauties in his arms, nothing at all between them, their skin hot against his and their taste fresh in his mouth. He wonders, twirling a lock of Sypha’s hair between his fingers, how exactly they got here.

No. That’s not the right question; the answer is obvious. They learned to trust each other first in battle, in a battle Adrian expected would kill them all, even in victory. _Living through it is just a luxury._ Too surprised at still being alive in the aftermath to muster their usual defenses, they’d learned to trust each other’s motivations and judgment, the sincerity of the words and gestures and touches that passed between them. And they’d learned to trust their own bodies and minds to know what they wanted. Simple.

Less simple is the way they'd trusted him to be this thing that he is, all his dangerous impulses included—willingly bared themselves to him, shared more of themselves than any ordinary human could ever be expected to share with a lover. But then, they are not ordinary. They are courageous and brilliant—and _they_ are dangerous, too. His humans, his loves, his _equals_ : deadly they are, all three of them. Maybe that kind of lethality only ever feels comfortable curled in the arms of something equally dangerous.

He glances down; Sypha has a thin line of drool forming at the corner of her mouth. Trevor mumbles in his sleep, something about cabbage and demonic possession and _set it on fire_.

Adrian smiles, feels an inexplicable dampness welling in his eyes. "Maybe not," he says, quiet, running his fingers through Trevor's hair in a gesture he hopes will be calming, because absurd dream or not, the hunter does not seem _pleased_ about the prospect of demon vegetables.

Sypha would have a different answer to the question—she would not see any value in tracking the how and the why. They are here now; they are happier than they have been in living memory; the past and the future matter but only in as much as they weave together at their edges to form the present. Stories from yesterday and stories from tomorrow, but the telling always happens now, and there is a story in _that_ moment, too.

Trevor? Trevor would laugh it off. They like each other—they _love_ each other, but he would say _like_ —and apparently now they're all fucking, what else is there to think about? He would silence further protest with one of those brain melting kisses, careless of Adrian’s fangs, coming up bloodied and laughing and wild… all to mask the secret, panicked freakout constantly happening behind his eyes. Because what does a damaged, socially isolated wanderer—forged in battle and loss, raised to believe in the black-and-white purity of his purpose, of his place in the world—know about loving, about loving two people at once, about loving men and women and monsters all in the same breath? More than he should, it would seem, and maybe that’s the problem.

So how did they get here? Trevor would claim ignorance, would joke about vampiric glamours and enthrallment and witches stealing men's hearts and sealing them in jars, all in order to avoid facing the real answer.

Adrian closes his eyes, tightens his grip on the both of them, grounds himself in their intoxicating warmth.

_Is this what it felt like for you?_ There's a spectre of his father in his mind, the man who stopped existing on that miserable January day in 1475. He'd nearly been consumed by the mad caricature that came after, but with the help of these two, Adrian has been able to piece him back together. The cracks are still visible, glowing lines crisscrossing the visage, marking him clearly as a broken and repaired thing—but it's nice to have someone to ask these questions to, even if he never gets a response. _When you woke with my mother in your arms and realized there was nowhere else in all the world you'd rather be, no other time in all of history that could match that moment for its splendor?_

There are things he understands better, now—adult realities that his child-self couldn't have fathomed. They’re right that it isn’t pure selfishness, but neither is it really devotion either. It's nothing as conscious or deliberate as those things. The science his mother taught him would have him believe that blood is blood is blood, but the love he has for these two, or maybe the love they have for him, has infused them with a savor that rips through him like a physical force every time it hits his tongue. It’s heat-warped like the summer horizon, and sweet and heady, and it makes him feel like nothing has ever been wrong in the world or ever will be again. No anger, no fear in this place; no past mistakes, no enemies lurking or wolves at the door. No lost or broken or irreparably ruined things. Just the opium bliss of knowing that only one other being exists in the world with you, and they love you so very, very fiercely.

_No wonder_ , he thinks, listening to the storm outside, listening to the sleepy breath and reassuring, even cadence of their heartbeats. _No wonder._

* *

Once he wakes up, eats something, and lodges his obligatory complaints about the weather, Trevor spends the rest of the day down in the hold. And the next few days after that, pulling books from those personal family shelves and scouring through them for, Adrian assumes, some sort of revelation regarding the oddity in his blood. Adrian isn’t sure what exactly he expects to find—a journal entry from a hundred years ago maybe, ‘Dear diary, today I ate a demon heart on a dare and now I and my descendants are fucked forevermore’?

Somehow, he doubts it will be that easy.

He isn’t even really sure it’s necessary; he’d been honest when he told Trevor that it was likely just an insignificant quirk of his bloodline. There’d always been some mythos in the vampire community surrounding the Belmonts and their blood, some claiming that it was possessed of magical qualities, others that it sat on the tongue like nectar and fire—but no one had ever been able to produce a vampire who’d actually tasted it and lived. Well. Until now, he supposes, but that’s neither here nor there.

And this is honestly painful to watch, the way Trevor stacks up wobbly towers of antique and priceless tomes with no regard for their safety, the way he jumps from one book to the next with no apparent plan and doesn’t even keep organized notes about what he’s found. He has absolutely no business trying to research anything; he’s terrible at it, and it’s driving Adrian crazy.

It would probably be best for both of them if he stopped watching creepily from the shadows as Trevor goes in endless circles, swearing ever more creatively at every dead end—if he actually jumped in and _helped_. So Adrian sidles up behind him without a sound, announces his presence with a kiss to the side of his neck; is rewarded with a startled yelp, the book Trevor has open shuffling closed over his hand.

“You have got to stop doing that,” Trevor complains, catching his breath.

“And miss out on all this glorious flustering?”

“Arsehole. I'll put a fucking bell on you.”

“Mm. Made any progress?” Adrian sets his chin on Trevor’s shoulder from behind, drapes one arm over his chest. It's strange, how comfortable he has become with this sort of closeness. Even with past lovers, as childish as those relationships feel now, he'd never overcome that desire to maintain his space. “You’re chewing through your resources at an alarming rate. We _could_ help, you know, Sypha and I. We’re good at this sort of thing.”

Trevor shrugs his shoulder, a half-hearted attempt to dislodge him. “Maybe once I’ve ruled out the really scary stuff.”

‘Scary stuff’? Trevor Belmont, the man who took on an attacking force of demons single-handedly and reacted to Dracula hurting one of his friends by trying to punch him in the face—afraid of nothing, not even death. What could possibly—

Adrian glances down at the book that’s closed over Trevor’s place-keeping hand; it’s in Latin, which he knows the hunter struggles with but can eventually brute force his way through, given enough time and enough motivation to bother. _Biology ex occultis creaturae._ Biology of hidden creatures, or occult creatures—something like that. Latin’s a bit of a moving target, even when one is fluent.

Telegraphing his intent, Adrian slides his hand in between the pages alongside Trevor’s, opens the book back to where he’d been reading.

Under their hands sprawls a detailed passage on the process of vampiric turning. Adrian blinks, lifts his head from Trevor’s shoulder. Wait, why would he be reading about—

“Why are you worried about _that_?” he asks, sliding around to sit in the chair next to Trevor; it feels important, suddenly, to face him, to be on his level.

A shrug, deflecting. “Just. Seemed like something I should check into.”

“It isn’t possible,” Adrian says, evenly, reassuring—then lets a bit of a grin crack through. “Unless you’ve been going around sucking on other vampires.”

“Pfft.” Trevor rolls his eyes at the innuendo. “No, you’re the only one with that privilege.”

“One I haven’t actually exercised yet.”

“Maybe later,” Trevor says, and it should be a saucy tease but his heart isn’t in it; he’s too distracted. He breathes out harshly through his nose, drums his fingers on the page in front of them. Focuses out on middle distance. “No, though. Do you remember when you bit me? When you were hurt.”

Adrian cocks his head, curious. Surely he doesn't think... “How could I forget?”

“Yeah, well, you were coughing up a lot of blood. It was… kind of a huge mess. All over your mouth, all over your teeth.”

"You're worried it got into you," Adrian concludes, and all right, that at least makes some sense, except... “I suppose this would be a good time, then, to point out that I’m not actually capable of turning people.”

That snaps Trevor out of his stare; he looks back to Adrian in surprise. “Really.”

“No, I just said it for the hell of it." He just barely manages to not roll his eyes. "Yes, really. Whatever it is that makes this…” he waves vaguely at himself. “… _status_ transmissible, I don’t seem to have it.”

Trevor’s eyebrows pinch in suspicion. “What, you’ve tried?”

“No,” Adrian says, and maybe he should feel insulted, but there’s something reassuring in the fact that Trevor has never, probably will never, completely let down his guard. He would expect no less. “But at one point my mother and I ran some tests on plated blood. We were curious about it as well.” For a moment, he can almost see her again, from a youth’s perspective; beneficent and brilliant and capable of doing no wrong, no matter that she’d just poked him in the finger. “…unless it’s overwhelmed by sheer quantity, human blood chews through mine like it would any foreign substance. And experiences no changes itself.”

Trevor takes a second to process that, then the relief comes off of him in waves, bubbling up into a mirthless laughter. “All right, then. No more bullshit Latin,” he says, closing the book resolutely and pushing it aside. He rubs one hand over his eyes. “Thank god.”

Adrian gives him a moment to collect himself; it’s clearly not just the annoyance of reading Latin that’s been lifted away. He glances at the table, and there are a lot of random books here but more interesting is a comprehensive family tree drawn out on a large rectangle of parchment, yellowed with age but very much still intact. The ink gets fresher as it goes down, and he can see Trevor’s name penned in near the bottom, at the rightmost corner of that sprawling generation of six. Wait—was he the youngest? Interesting.

“What else have you found?” Adrian asks, looking up before his pride forces him to comment on the revelation. Runt with a family crest indeed.

Trevor shakes his head, reaches for the tree first, pulling it front and center. “Mostly that there’s not a lot of information about all these people who married in. Something weird could have come in with any of them, but the really detailed stuff only seems to follow the direct Belmont bloodline. Something in one of the journals about these guys up here,” he says, tapping a finger on the handful of offspring of Leon Belmont himself, “where the church wanted to go after them for _something_ , because nothing ever changes, I guess. But then they took out a massive werewolf that was terrorizing the area and the church sort of shut the fuck up.”

“As well they should have. Any sense of what the _something_ was?”

“Nah. But I mean, the church killed us all off while I was here and it’s not like I’ve ever figured out what good reason they could have had for _that,_ outside of dogmatic bullshit. Probably nothing real.”

Adrian runs his eye down the edges of the tree, the overhanging branches where foreign bloodlines joined and blended with what was already there. It’s tempting to blame one of them for the strangeness he’d tasted, but... “It could have always been there,” he says. “There were obviously Belmonts further back than this tree indicates.”

“Yeah, and we’ve always had a lot of family weirdness. More than I realized, actually.”

Hm. That’s… interesting. Adrian remembers reading some theories as to the way certain conditions pass through families the same way eye color or facial structure do; just another bit of knowledge that’s been forgotten and lost. “What sort of ‘weirdness’?”

Trevor shrugs, pages open one of the journals. “Lot of color-blindness—I knew about that one. My father had it. But just. Weirdness. Extra fingers, things on the wrong side, I guess there was one kid who would just _bleed_ without stopping, but they only found out because he died from it, so I guess it sort of dead-ended with him.”

He’s seen Trevor bleed and not die, so that’s out, but—“You’re not color-blind.”

“Nope.”

“And you don’t have any extra fingers.”

Trevor lifts his hands palm-forward, waggles his fingers in self-explanatory answer. “But I do have the heart thing, actually. Just didn’t know it ran in the family.”

Adrian narrows his eyes at Trevor’s flippancy; this sounds like it could be important. “What ‘heart thing’?”

“Here,” Trevor says, still unconcerned, taking Adrian’s wrist in his hand and pressing his palm flat up against his chest—just left of center, where the heart sits. “Feel anything?”

He… wait. He _doesn’t_. Adrian feels his mouth fall open a bit, eyes widening. If he couldn’t _hear_ the heartbeat clear as day, he’d almost think…

Then Trevor slides his hand across to the right, in just the opposite position, and there it is, thrumming under his palm.

“That’s remarkable,” Adrian says, and his cool, collected dignity can take a hike because this is science and medicine that appeared nowhere in his mother's books, is completely outside the realm of things he’s learned about in the past. He spreads his fingers, seeking more contact. “How on earth did I never notice that?”

Trevor shrugs, smirks. “I don’t know, maybe you’re just not that observant.”

“I suppose not.” On some level, he’s aware that was an insult, but it flies right by. “And this is common in your family?”

“Not… common, but not _un_ common? It crops up sometimes. It’s why they forced me to learn to use my left hand in close combat. Present a less vulnerable target that way.”

“I remember noticing that, when we were fighting.” Adrian lets his hand drop away. “Whip in the right hand, sword in the left. I thought you were toying with me.”

“No, just force of habit. I can pretty much use either of them, these days.”

A valuable skill, one that had surprised Adrian under Greşit and forced him to improvise a bit in his own fighting style; one possible reason the fight went on as long as it did and was able to pull to such a graceful stalemate. All these things he hadn’t known. Adrian leans back in the chair, regarding his hunter for a long moment with a newfound sense of wonder.

Trevor looks right back at him, something like skepticism in his expression. “Anyway, slouch king,” he says with a laugh, “I don’t think any of that would make me taste weird, right?”

Adrian shakes his head, lacing his fingers across his abdomen. “No, it wouldn’t,” he says, then cocks his head to the side. “You have a problem with my posture? Yours is worse.”

“Yeah, but _I’m_ not the prince of the night.”

“Didn’t you know, Belmont?” Adrian levels a positively wicked grin at him, smoldering with unholy intent. “All good villainous immortals sprawl luxuriously. It’s in the contract.”

Trevor snorts. “Oh, so you’re a villain now? Do I to need to break out the stakes?”

Adrian laughs, tight. Reaches up to push a strand of hair behind his ear. “I suppose not, if that’s the cost. But I’m not the prince of anything, either. Not anymore.”

In the silence that follows, it surprises him to realize how much regret that actually dredges up; it’s not that he’d been looking forward to following in his father’s footsteps, dealing with politics and backbiting and a social system based on an amorality he couldn’t subscribe to. He hadn’t even intended to do so. His mother had been a strong enough advocate for him following his own path that he’d never felt _obligated_ to be the court prince, the exotic heir to be trotted around and shown off—and opportunities to do so were rare to begin with, so much had Dracula withdrawn from active leadership during their family’s brief span of happiness.

But he wonders, sometimes: could he have made a difference, in a more official capacity? Could he make a difference now, were that mantle still available to him? He has the castle and the bloodline; he’s the heir to the Dragon’s Court in all but act and deed. How long will it be, before someone sees that technicality as a threat, as an obstacle in their path to seizing power?

Adrian looks up, meets Trevor’s eyes. They’re watching him carefully, slightly pinched in concern.

_How long_ , he wonders, _before I have to start worrying about collateral damage?_

He sits up, takes Trevor’s hand where it’s curled over that family tree, fingers lacing together without a word and giving a gentle squeeze.

“Head up with me?” Adrian asks. “It’s my turn to get dinner together, but I could use a hand.”

“You’ve got one,” Trevor says, closing the journal, squeezing right back.

* *

With Trevor’s help—he’s a wrecking ball in the kitchen, but he does have good instincts for what will taste good, better than Adrian’s—they come up with something fancier than usual for the evening meal: fish from the nearby stream, stuffed with vegetables and nuts and spices and roasted up in the oven until the skin is crisping off of them in fine brown curls. Sypha laughs that they should have wine with such a nice dinner, and Trevor already has a bottle at the ready, of _course_. It’s a red despite the fact that they’re having fish, and while a few months ago he might have assumed the man was ignorant of how inappropriate the choice is, he now knows that Trevor does things like this just to piss him off. It’s more endearing than it should be.

Still, he very considerately fills Adrian’s glass only halfway, leaving him the rest of the room to cut it with blood and hopefully avoid the usual pounding headache the wine brings on. They had been very entertained when he’d told them about that, back when they’d all just met—such a weirdly human weakness, and what kind of vampire can’t lavishly swirl a glass of wine like a properly sophisticated demon?—at which time he’d pointed out that mixing it down with blood only makes it _more_ appropriate. Aesthetically.  

At which point Trevor had told him to shut his face, _aesthetically_ , and had drank the entire rest of the bottle, requiring them to peel him off the tavern floor and manhandle him up to the room they’d rented for the night. The good old days.

These days, Adrian finds, he likes better—even if they lack the adrenaline edge of never knowing when the next attack will come or whether their hunter will be sober enough to fight it off. These days, he has a home filled with life, and a warm bed filled with love, and a future filled with hope. The grief is there, but it’s healing; the castle still houses lurking memories, but he’s reclaiming it for himself corner by corner, cleaning out the cobwebs and the ghosts all at once. It’s a kind of peace, a sort he never thought he’d have access to.

He knows it can’t last.

Consider: the night creatures that haven’t just disappeared; the village and the church with their history of burning out what they don’t understand; Carmilla and her unidentified betrayer; all the other clans and covens and family clusters of vampires, their leaders hungry for power. There are a thousand swords hanging above their heads—in the human and vampire worlds alike—and it would take nothing for fate to snap one of those strings, or a dozen.

And even if every string remains uncut, the swords twisting harmlessly above them like windchimes for the rest of time… well, time itself is an enemy, isn’t it?

They cluster in one of the sitting rooms after dinner, a roaring fire in the fireplace silhouetting Trevor and Sypha in gold-edged black as they sit on the floor in front of it, talking through an idea she’s had about coordinating magical and physical attacks in set ways to produce maximum damage. Trevor, of course, doesn’t like _set_ anything; if he can’t improvise, he’s not interested. The debate is lively.

Adrian just sits a ways away with the sketchbook he recently found hiding in his old things, doing his best to capture their shadowed forms in motion, the firelight limning them with a kind of ethereal vitality that he knows he will, eventually, lose to memory.

* *

So: Trevor is down in the hold a lot, is still unsettled, but he comes up for meals, and he comes up at night to crawl back inside this space they’ve made for themselves, and when he says that he’s fine he genuinely seems to mean it.

But those first few nights, he doesn’t let them touch him.

* *

“I just. I don’t know. I want to do this for _you_ ,” he says, as he crawls up between Sypha’s legs, laves his tongue over the bite mark Adrian left a few mornings ago—and if the entire scenario didn’t already have Adrian hard against Sypha’s back, that alone would have done it, _fucking hell_. And she bites her lip, because this is the third night in a row Trevor’s gone without any satisfaction himself, but he’s looking up at both of them with such eager, desperate eyes that she can’t help but cave.

So she nods, and Trevor smiles, something like actual, honest joy—then ducks his head and licks into her with enthusiastic, ravenous abandon. He settles down there like it’s a long-lost home, hands clutching her hips and eyes closed and lost in it. It’s like he was made for this, not for hunting and fighting and bringing terrible demise down upon the damned. Just this, here, now: pressing into Sypha’s wet warmth like it’s heaven come on earth.

And Sypha falls apart bit by bit in Adrian’s arms, her mortal heat a brand against his chest, the curve of her breasts impossibly soft under his fingers—he doesn’t expect anything about her to be _soft_ ; she is all mettle and ferocity, but they are still learning each other. She’s trembling and moaning and jerking against him, rocking her hips into Trevor’s face, making a desperate bid for more contact. When she comes she does it hard, heels dug into Trevor’s shoulders and throat raw with a fragmented noise that shakes itself out over long seconds, vibrating through both of their bodies and making Adrian _want_ desperately—want to feel those throes from inside of her, to feel her clench down and spasm and know that he played a part in giving her such pleasure. To feel that cry seized between his teeth.

These impulses—not the usual crude, idle fantasies that accompany taking any new lover, but these urgent, fierce needs that hit him out of nowhere, that inflame his blood and make his teeth ache—are not ones he’s fully comfortable with, yet. He’s no virgin, but the immediacy of the urges is new, makes them painfully hard to resist, and there are too many ways he could hurt them both. They must set the pace of this, no matter what he wants or how badly he wants it.

Against his chest, Sypha shudders out an aftershock, and Adrian buries his face in her shoulder, just barely manages not to rut against her back like an animal in heat.

“You’re good at that,” she says to Trevor after a moment, a little dazed, pleasure a hazy filter on her voice. Her fingers are threaded through Trevor’s hair, his face pillowed on her thigh. She turns her head back toward Adrian; he looks up from where he’s gotten distracted mouthing along the line of her throat. “He’s good at that.”

Adrian takes a steadying breath. “Is he now?”

“Mmhm.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it for the moment, I think,” Adrian says, smirking down at Trevor, forcing calm into his voice. “It appears as if you’ve worn him out.”

Trevor narrows his eyes at that, makes a fair attempt at a scowl considering how debauched he looks, his lips flushed and slick with spit and with Sypha. “Is that a challenge?”

Here we go. “Do you want it to be?”

But instead of sniping back, Trevor just _looks_ at him for a moment, blinking up from the softness of Sypha’s leg-pillow, caught hard in inertia’s grasp. Then he moves all at once, rolling back onto his heels and gesturing with his hand. “Move your arse then, I can’t do this _through_ Sypha.”

And Adrian had assumed this to be mostly posturing—that despite his joking down in the hold, Trevor would need some coaxing through an incipient sinner’s crisis before committing to anything more intimate with him than the kissing they’ve been doing. Adrian is man and monster both, not the usual purview of good boys raised to battle the night. But apparently, this is happening, and Trevor is fully on-board, his arousal plain now that he’s no longer sprawled face-down on the bed.

Adrian masks his surprise, wriggles a little under Sypha’s liquid-like sprawl. “It might make more sense to have Sypha move,” he says, stalling a bit. She’s warm and comfortable. “I’m pinned rather helplessly at the moment.”

Trevor laughs, takes Sypha by the shoulders and wobbles her side to side; giggling like a drunk, she lets him do it, head lolling in a way that only makes her laugh harder. “She is checked the fuck out, if you hadn’t noticed,” he says, a distinct note of pride in his voice. “Not going anywhere on her own. You want to _join her_ , then use that fancy dhampir strength of yours and _shift_.”

Narrowing his eyes for a moment—he’s never heard Trevor refer to him that way, going rather abruptly from _vampire_ as a slur to _vampire_ as an affectionate joke without much in the way of serious acknowledgement in between—Adrian purses his lips, then leans back in to whisper. “Sypha? I’m going to lean you forward a bit—don’t fall over,” he warns.

“M’fine,” she says, and she’s happy and very unsteady but Trevor’s got her hand for balance as Adrian slips out from behind her. She seems content, once he’s no longer propping her up, to drop back into the pillows, twisting onto her side. She’s watching them, intently, with a hunger that’s only a little dulled by the orgasm she’s just had.

“I’m not sure what the best arrangement would be,” Adrian muses, but Trevor just pulls himself up between Adrian’s legs, twisted a little onto his hip so he doesn’t have to go flat against the bed again—that looks like it would be painful, as things stand—and winds his arms around Adrian’s thighs, getting a grip on his hipbones. It’s natural, practiced, and Adrian suddenly can’t imagine a better way to do this. He raises an eyebrow. “Though you seem to have a _plan_.”

“We going to pretend that I’ve never done this before?” Trevor asks, and Sypha moans at the implications of that, biting her lip. Trevor’s smirking the same way he did back in Greşit, the length of his whip running through his fingers like water, redirected onto a collision course that had been nothing short of supernatural in its precision. _That_ smirk. The one that says, _you don’t know what’s coming_. “I mean, we _can_ , if it’ll make you feel special.”

That smirk, those glittering ice-blue eyes dark and half-lidded in something between threat and promise—at the other end of a blade or a whip or a pointed stick, but also here, down between Adrian’s thighs, the heat of mortal breath searing over his flesh.

And he is, again, a little surprised—willingness and desire aside, most human males he's talked to don’t have a lot of _experience_ with this more heretical side of carnality. It’s a dangerous game to play, out there in the wider world where everything and everyone is under the watchful eye of the church. But then, the man _is_ excommunicated. His standing can’t get much worse, and that’s probably the point at which most people say _Screw it, I’ll do what I want._

For that matter, he’s also a Belmont, and he’s lying here naked with the heir to Dracula’s bloodline, a pair of still-livid bite marks on his throat, nothing on his face but affection and hunger. That is, perhaps, the more surprising aspect of this. That it didn’t initially occur to Adrian might say something about how far they’ve come.

“I already feel special,” he finds himself saying, breathless; Trevor’s face is rough with stubble under his fingers, and warm. He can feel Sypha’s gaze on them, intent. “Just having you here.”

And that’s maybe too sentimental to just leave alone, because Trevor rolls his eyes, but the rest of his expression doesn’t follow. Then he’s surging forward, taking Adrian into that velvety heat without another word and _oh_ , oh good _god_. Sypha’s right; Trevor is very, very good at this.

For a good long while there, Adrian’s thinking mind shuts down, his world narrowed to heat and lips and tongue and teeth, the feel of Trevor’s hair under his hands and Trevor’s fingers dug roughly into his hipbones—a solid if futile effort to steady him when he bucks. Then another note is added to the symphony: Sypha is kissing him, deeply and with the strength of her whole body; he can feel her pressed against his side, can feel where she’s still damp. He bites at her mouth, wants to taste her, wants to taste Trevor, wants to burrow inside them and never come out again; it’s all so deliciously drawn-out, a slow spiral that never loses its momentum and never rushes. It’s tugging him out of himself in pieces, and each one _hurts_ as it goes but feels wonderful all the same, like the most pleasant dissolution Adrian can imagine.

Then Trevor does something with his tongue that Adrian can only describe as _magical,_ and that world shatters into a million spinning pieces, a kaleidoscope of lust and love and longing all threaded through with the expected wave of heat and pleasure—making it into something shocking, something new. He hears Trevor’s name in his own voice, a broken plea against the press of Sypha’s mouth.

The come-down is as lovely as the climb was, all hot breath and kisses pressed to the crease of his thigh and calloused fingers rasping over his skin. But even in the aftermath, glowing and proud and still hard enough to knock a door down, Trevor won’t let them touch him.

* *

It’s a guilty night for sleep.

Trevor is sandwiched between them, mumbling vaguely in his sleep, but Adrian struggles, drifting in and out. They’d convinced him into this intimacy by assuring him that it wasn’t selfishness on his part, and yet here he lies, satisfied to the core while the man tucked up against his chest is spending another night wrapped up in restless, unsated dreams.

The most frustrating part of it is that Adrian doesn’t _understand_. Trevor’s so willing to do so many things for _them,_ and had no compunctions the first time; why is his own pleasure suddenly off-limits? It makes no sense.

Then the incoherent sleep-talking becomes more urgent, threading through with fear, with _no, don’t_ and _please_ , and Adrian’s eyes snap open. He reaches up to Trevor’s shoulder without even thinking about it, gives him a gentle shake.

“...don’t want this—” Trevor moans, then wakes all at once, going unnaturally still.

“Are you all right?” Adrian asks, a whisper.

He can feel the full-body shudder run through Trevor, like terror itself trying to find a route to ground.

“Dream,” he says, finally, equally quiet. He sounds relieved, almost. “Nothing important, sorry. Were you asleep?”

“Not entirely.” Adrian slides his hand down across Trevor’s chest. “What sort of dream?”

A long stretch of nothing; Adrian wonders for a moment if Trevor’s drifted back off.

“I… don’t know how to describe it,” he says, finally. “Nothing _real_. Just… images, and feelings. Pain, and dread, and… betrayal, I guess. Like I’m losing myself. Fire, maybe? Those stupid flowers you were going on about.”

Adrian presses his eyes closed, breathes out harshly. “Is this connected to that? That morning?”

“I saw it then, too,” Trevor confirms. “Thought it was weird, but whatever. Then it started up at night. I think you and Sypha are there? But you’re not really _you_.”

Of course. This is beginning to make sense, in as much as it makes no sense at all but does, at least, explain things.

“…that’s the worst part, I think,” Trevor continues. “And the fact that it just keeps happening, _every fucking night_. Because shit isn’t complicated enough.”

Complicated. Adrian licks his lips, steels himself. “You said you didn’t want this,” he says. “When you were in the dream. Does that mean that you—”

“Oh, god no,” Trevor cuts him off. “Don’t even—look, it’s just a stupid dream. You ought to know they don’t mean anything.”

“But it did start then. And you’ve been avoiding the circumstances.”

A shrug against the pillow. “If I don’t get off, it won’t happen again, and then it’s not a _thing_ , not some magical bullshit that’s real and that I have to deal with.” He’s gone tense, tight. “I’m tired of shit being weird.”

An odd sentiment, from someone in his line of work. “I don’t know if that’s the best—”

“I know,” Trevor says, reaching up to press on his eyes. “It’s stupid, I _know_. Not like I take any of my other dreams this seriously.”

Adrian trails his fingers over the curve of Trevor’s collarbone, idle. “No possessed cabbage in our future, then?”

A pause, then the effect Adrian had been hoping for: Trevor chuckles, indulgent. “No, that was a different one. Terrifying, though. Remind me to have Sypha put wards on the garden, just in case.”

“Wards are fun,” she mumbles, half-asleep, face buried in blankets. “Put wards on anything you want.”

“That could be interesting,” Adrian says, smiling against Trevor’s neck. “Wards on the wine cellar, maybe?”

“Wha…” she says, coming more fully conscious. “Why are we awake?”

“Trevor’s been having a rather discomfiting recurring dream,” Adrian says, sparing the man the chore of explaining it all again. “Which is apparently the reason he’s been refusing our affections.”

“Because of a dream?” she asks, lifting her head out of the blankets. “Really?”

“It’s a pretty shitty dream,” Trevor says in his own defense. “And it started after we did, uh, stuff.”

“Is that the stage we’re at now?” she asks, grinning. “We’re calling it ‘stuff’? As often as you say the word ‘fuck’ in every other circumstance?”

“Personally,” Adrian puts in, “I would call it ‘using my impressive manual dexterity to give you an orgasm so mind-blowing that you received a vision like some sort of erotic prophet’.”

Trevor snorts. “I bet you fucking would.”

“Well,” Sypha says, yawning dramatically. “I would very much like to do _stuff_ to you, Trevor Belmont. Which, I feel like I have to point out, I have not gotten the chance to do yet.”

Adrian shifts his arm, touching where Trevor’s heart beats. “I think it would help,” he says, evenly, “to know that it will not, in fact, happen every time.”

“I… guess so?” Trevor says, sounding unconvinced. “I mean, if you really want to…”

Sypha’s already moving around under the blanket, and Adrian can tell the moment she finds him; Trevor sucks in a gasp, eyes going wider.

“Please, let us help you?” she says, her smile its own appeal. “It will get rid of that ugly dream, and then we can do _stuff_ whenever we want to.”

“God, I’m never going to live this down, am I?”

“ _Never_ , Treffy.”

Trevor groans theatrically, then nods, resolve crumbling in an instant. Sypha slides up closer to him, hands occupied under the covers. Adrian can’t tell what she’s doing down there, but the blanket shifts as she hooks a leg over Trevor’s hips and the second breath he sucks in is longer, more reverent, eyes falling closed—and then Adrian understands.

It’s a slow, gentle thing, half-asleep as they all are—Trevor rocking against Sypha, Adrian dragging fingers over Trevor’s chest and pressing kisses to his throat, luxuriating in the gooseflesh his touch brings out, in his bedmates’ quiet noises of pleasure. His hand drifts down into the dark, damp heat of the place where they’re joined, and Sypha and Trevor both gasp in something between surprise and wonder. When he tries to move it away again, Sypha grabs him by the wrist.

“Keep it there,” she says, breathless, and he does because he finds lately that he can refuse Sypha nothing, and also because he does not think he could break this contact if he tried _._ He twists his wrist awkwardly, dips one finger against her and rubs in time with their movement, earning a startled moan from her that twists into a curse.

Sypha finishes first, of course she does; they’ve already learned that Trevor is first and foremost a giver, and she’s being double-teamed besides. But Trevor follows only seconds behind, moaning into her shoulder, undone in the wake of her quiet, shuddering climax. He tries to pull away, to get clear, but with Adrian at his back and Sypha clutching him so tightly, there’s nowhere to go.

“Don’t worry,” she says after, a soothing whisper. “I’m a magician; I know tricks. Nothing will come of this that we don’t want.”

“Are you all right?” Adrian asks quietly, mouthing the curve of Trevor’s ear.

After a moment, Trevor nods, dazed. “…yeah.”

“No more strange visions?”

A huffed laugh. “Not this time.”

“Good,” Adrian says, reaching to straighten out the blanket, to pull it free from where it’s gotten pinched between bodies and generally rucked up out of place. It falls over them like the morning fog, enveloping. “With luck, the dreams will stop as well.”

“And we’ll all sleep better,” Sypha says; Trevor laughs, sounding drained.

And, lo and behold, they do: deep and dreamless and cradled in the moonlight’s glow.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently, this is the ridiculously indulgent HERE ARE MY HEADCANONS LET ME SHOW YOU THEM chapter. 
> 
> HC1: I’ve been convinced for a long time that Trevor has asymptomatic dextrocardia, on account of there being no earthly way he could have survived Curse of Darkness otherwise—and even if you buy ~~magical healing~~, there’s still no way he could have had an extensive conversation with Isaac with a fucking knife in his heart (come on, Konami; we don’t ask for much realism in a game about magical resurrecting vampires but COME THE FUCK ON). While it’s often a random spontaneous mutation, there are forms of it that run in families as a recessive trait, and I like my Belmonts as weird as possible.
> 
> HC2: Alucard gets red wine headaches. Lisa did, too; he gets it from her. Probably tannin related; mixing it with blood helps him ‘heal’ the headache as it happens. This is extremely questionable science, but so are fucking vampires, so bite me.
> 
> (Also, not a headcanon, but I guess it’s Word of God that Trevor’s functionally ambidextrous. Which I think just means they didn’t want to bother sorting out his handedness during fight scene animations, pfft. From what I’ve read, the only reason Alucard is so consistently right-handed with his sword in the show is because Konami was REALLY WEIRDLY INSISTANT about it.)
> 
> Also, porn. Sorry, if porn isn't your thing. There's character growth to be had in all sorts of moments. The next chapter should be clean, fwiw.


	10. Chapter 10

*

“So, just to be clear: which _do_ you prefer?”

Adrian doesn’t even look up from his sketchbook. Lazar is in the flowers, pestering butterflies, and it seemed worth attempting to capture. For science, of course. “That would rather depend on what _which_ you’re talking about.”

“That… does not sound grammatically correct,” Sypha scolds.

“My apologies,” Adrian says, glancing up at her.

Trevor smirks, rubbing the oiled cloth carefully down the braided length of his whip. It is, apparently, all about applying it evenly, never mind what has to happen to the excess. The process is unapologetically messy in his hands, and that’s why they took this equipment maintenance session out of doors. “Don’t you remember, back in Greşit? I said I’d call you anything you liked.”

“Mm. Contingent upon me ‘showing you my teeth’.”

“Which I think we can say has happened, at this point. Or at least, I can say I _know_ them pretty well.”

Adrian finally looks up at him, charcoal stilling in his fingers, leveling a cool stare.

“You know,” Trevor says, lounging back against the tree trunk, looping the whip suggestively around his fist and giving it a tug. “ _Biblically_.”

Sypha chokes on her chamomile; Adrian pinches the bridge of his nose. “All right, fine, _stop_. What exactly are you asking?”

“Adrian or Alucard?” Trevor asks, cutting straight to it. “Or something else that we haven’t figured out yet. High Lord Țepeș? Captain Shinypants?”

Adrian rolls his eyes so hard that it almost hurts, and that chamomile is destined to end up sprayed into the grass one way or another, but then Trevor puts his hand in the air, a quiet _pause._

“I am actually asking,” he says. “Even if I’m being an arse about it.”

A long, considered pause; It’s a more complicated question than they probably realize. Trevor leaves him to it, upending the bottle of oil onto the cloth and moving on to the next section. The whip’s fine, he says, but this has to be done once a year or so, to keep it that way. It’s an ancient, priceless heirloom despite the way he has of accidentally sitting on it at times; it’s no less worthy of upkeep than Adrian’s mother’s sword, lying in its scabbard a few feet away and already cleaned and honed. The Morning Star, likewise, has had the tarnish burnished off its silvered surface, is glinting in the light.

His mother would want him going by Adrian. But _Adrian_ goes with _Țepeș,_ the name he got from his father, and no matter that that’s who he still is in his own mind, it’s not a connection that it feels wise to flaunt—even here and now, on the other side of the war.

“…I think,” Adrian finally says, and the other two look up, paying careful attention. “That as far as the rest of Wallachia is concerned, I should remain Alucard. There’s a symbolism in it that matters, to them _and_ to me.”

Trevor smirks. “The whole backwards spelling thing?”

Adrian raises an eyebrow. “And just how long did it take you to figure that out?”

“I figured it out _immediately,_ thank you very much.”

“Not two weeks down the road? A sudden thunderclap of epiphany while you were brushing out the horses, perhaps?”

“That’s…” Trevor looks at Sypha, entertainingly betrayed. “Very specific.”

“It is. But no,” Adrian says, narrowing his eyes with a sharp, thoughtful look. “That’s trivial. Those who came up with it were—limited in their creativity. It’s more the fact that it’s a name given to me by humanity, and one that I chose for myself, when given that choice. It will be important to remind both humankind and what remains of vampire society of that allegiance.”

Sypha frowns, glances at Trevor, and he’s right there with her. Adrian knows: it’s a good answer for politics, but that isn’t the question they’d been asking.

“But,” he says, interrupting their protest before it can begin. “If the two of _you_ would like to use my given name… that would be acceptable.”

 _Acceptable,_ he says. He lets a fangy edge into to his smile, though, that says that he would actually very much like it, this clandestine acknowledgement and acceptance of the other half of his heritage.

“Only in private, yes?” Sypha says, more a statement than a question.

“Yes.”

“We can do that,” Trevor says, like a pronouncement, reaching out a hand to set it on his shoulder. “Adrian.”

Adrian nods, smiling. Trevor smiles back. It’s a nice moment. But then it just… doesn’t end. They stay like that, and the moment passes from significant to awkward to _what the hell_ in short order.

“That was… very dramatic, Trevor,” Sypha says, with a distinct undertone of _whatever this is, you can stop now_.

“It was, wasn’t it?” Trevor replies, grinning like an idiot, still not moving away.

And Adrian’s about to ask what exactly is going on here, when he feels it: the leather oil soaking Trevor’s hand is seeping through the shoulder of his shirt, nauseatingly greasy.

“Eugh, _disgusting_ ,” he moans, swatting Trevor’s hand off, reaching to peel the fabric up and away from his skin—and Trevor slumps sideways into the grass, so hard is he laughing, so helpless is he to stay upright.

“You fucking asshole,” Adrian says, shockingly classless, and Trevor just wheezes harder, struggling to draw breath.

“I swear,” Adrian says, picking at the fabric, “if I can’t get this to come clean through ordinary means, I will force you to _lick it_ until it does.”

Sypha is trying to help Trevor sit up, but that makes _her_ sputter and laugh too. “That’s… that’s a shameful waste of a perfectly good mouth, Adrian,” she gets out, and Trevor loses it again and honestly? This laughter, not the usual snickering and mocking but his _real_ laughter, is so lovely and rare that it’s almost enough to forgive him for the shirt.

Almost.

“Fine,” Adrian says, “but I will require repayment for my laundering troubles in one form or another.” He makes definitive eye contact with Trevor, smiles, licks a fang at him.

The laughter trails off. Then Trevor grins back at him, just as fierce, completely game—and ruined shirt or not, Adrian cannot honestly believe, some days, just how fortunate he is.

* *

Fortune can live or die on so little—a single piece of information, a misjudgment, a wrong move in the heat of battle. 

* *

Eventually, Trevor gives up on his laughable attempts at ‘research’. He's turned up enough to know that there’s no easy, obvious answer, but also nothing truly dangerous lurking in the branches of that family tree, all gnarled and twisted blackwood. He and Sypha are spending more time out of doors now, maybe in anticipation of winter on its way—Trevor cutting wood, Sypha tending the late season roots still faithfully growing in her garden, both of them keeping their combat skills in shape. Adrian watches them spar in the old practice field, and more often than not he joins in, helps Sypha put to practice the new magic she’s been reading about, helps Trevor stretch his fighting instincts and scratch the itch that prolonged peace is bringing out in him.

This morning, he’s up after Sypha but before Trevor, and it gives him time to ruminate—to wonder how long it will be before boredom sets in, before Trevor insists on going out into the land to hunt like he was born for, before Sypha’s craving for the open road overwhelms her fondness for home and safety and comfort, her fondness for them. He takes his time in the baths, lets the heat and the steam overwhelm him, wrap him in a haze not entirely unlike sleep—thinks about other kinds of sleep, and how long they can last, and the things they can provide an escape from, when no other options remain.

These are dark thoughts, though, and he’s learning slowly how to not indulge them. He pulls himself from the water, dries, dresses. Today is not for him, for his sadness. They are being productive today, but they are also going out to the estate ruins, to see if anything should or can be done for them before winter. Today, _he_ must be the rock.

When he gets down to the main hall, Trevor is there, kicking over the corner of one of the entry rugs. It’s foul underneath, moldy and rotten through from all of that water that soaked it for weeks, and that might be where some of the remaining stench is coming from.

“I know we put a lot of time into cleaning these stupid things,” he says, as Adrian approaches down the staircase; he’s still a good distance away, but Trevor doesn’t shout. He’s learned the acoustics of this place. “But I think they’re still kind of a loss.”

Adrian nods, stopping at the far edge of the rug. Trevor’s probably stalling, really, but he’s also not wrong. The bloodstains are faded but not completely gone; even if he couldn’t see them, he can still smell them, over top of the mold. And beyond even the rot, the rug is singed in places, torn in others. It looks like the ragged inheritance of a ruined kingdom.

“I agree,” he says after a moment. “I’ve been thinking about sending for some new ones. Perhaps I should now, before the weather starts closing the trade routes.”

“Same kind?” Trevor asks, and there are layers to the question. The décor of this place is still a gothic disaster in red and black, the colors of Dracula, of the Blood Dragon. It would be an overstatement to say that it’s making Trevor uncomfortable, but he clearly doesn’t like it, for any number of good and valid reasons.

“No,” Adrian says, shaking his head, eyes alighting for a moment on the crest shimmering on Trevor’s tunic. “I was thinking about black and _gold,_ perhaps.”

“Sounds fancy,” Trevor says. He thumbs at the handle of his whip. “Won’t hide bloodstains as well, though.”

“Hopefully? It won’t have to.”

* *

Out here among the wreckage of his childhood, the evidence of humanity’s viciousness in the face of anything it doesn’t understand, Trevor is quieter, more guarded. His steps are silent in all the soft stone dust and wood ash, and in the strangely foggy morning, he looks like a ghost, passing through broken archways and doorways that lead nowhere.

“This was the kitchen,” Trevor says, having stepped from one unidentifiable piece of the foundation to another. He points at the floor, jabbing repeatedly in the air as he tries to pin down the memory. “We weren’t supposed to eat here, but…” He casts around, kicking through the rubble with more care than a bunch of broken stone and blackened steel pans really require. When a particular cooking pot turns over, he stops, just looking for a long moment. “The cook would hide sweets for us in there, we just had to know to look. Shit, what was her name?”

The purpose, here, is not to torture Trevor with memories. It’s not even to clear away old debris or begin any new work. It’s just to assess what’s here and what they have to work with, if anything of the structure is salvageable. Sypha’s convinced Trevor to at least consider rebuilding, to work with Adrian over the winter on plans, and this is the first step. And probably the hardest.

“I can’t remember,” Trevor says, shaking his head at himself, disappointment clear in his voice. “I saw her every day for twelve years and she went out of her way to be kind, and I can’t remember her bloody name. How sad is that.”

Rather sad, for any number of reasons. “Were the servants here when the house was burned?”

“I don’t know.” Trevor reaches into the debris, pulls the pot out and sets it upright on a pile of loose brick that might have, a lifetime ago, been the cooking hearth. “No one got out, I know that much. So it’s just a matter of whether my family sent them away beforehand.”

Adrian walks the foundation one step at a time, gauging distances. He keeps a careful, watchful eye on Trevor as he’s doing it, but otherwise gives him space. “Would they have?”

“If they saw it coming, sure. But then, why stay here and let it happen?” Trevor shakes his head again, but this time the target isn’t himself. “No, they didn’t expect it. And I’m sure Missus Nice Cook and Mister Turtle Groundskeeper and all the rest of them cooked right along with my family. Because god _damn_ the church sure loves dragging innocents into this shit, don’t they.”

He kicks at a fallen timber; it explodes into dust and splinters, all eaten out by insects and rotted out by time and exposure.

Adrian counts the seconds out to three, then steps up into Trevor’s space, hand settling on the hunter’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asks, and it sounds stiff, and he really does wish Sypha were here.

“Fine,” Trevor spits, barely convincing himself. “This is… I’ll be honest, yeah, it’s rough. But it’s not _fresh_. Not like what you’ve been dealing with.”

“It isn’t actually a contest.”

A short burst of laughter, entirely humorless. “Imagine that.”

They stand for a long moment, watching the dust from the timber settle.

“How,” Trevor asks, quiet, “could they have not seen it coming?”

Adrian sighs. There’s no good answer.

“They had, they had—calendars and books all tied to the moon cycles and the patterns of, of _starling migrations_ so they could predict when, I don’t know, the demon Jobobob would rise again, but they didn’t notice their own people were planning to kill them?” Trevor’s voice is getting panicked and bright, and he’s rubbing at his eye like the scar aches. “Maybe they did know, and they thought they could win. Against fire. Because _that_ always goes so well.”

Adrian winces; they’re all familiar with how that typically turns out. “Trevor,” he says, because he can tell the hunter is getting caught up.

“With their fucking _kids_ in the house, even. Arrogant fucks—”

Instead of trying words again, Adrian runs his hand from Trevor’s shoulder up to the side of his face, leaning in with a gentle, calming kiss, there and gone again. It’s not meant to be salacious—just to momentarily distract, break the train of Trevor’s thoughts before it can spiral into a splintered wreck.

And it seems to work; whatever words Trevor had left slither out in a long, shuddery breath. Adrian settles their foreheads together, wraps his arm over the line of Trevor’s shoulders, lets it hang there heavy in a half-embrace.

“Don’t go back there,” he says. “Stay here with me.”

Trevor nods, and for a moment, they just breathe there together—the last son of the House of Belmont and the only son of their immortal enemy, shoring each other up among the ruins of both legacies.

“So,” Adrian queries into the silence, when it feels like enough time has passed. “Jobobob. Is that a real demon?”

A pause—then, incredibly, a huff of amusement, breathed into the space they share. “Of course that’s not a real fucking demon.”

“Of course. Trevor, don’t…” Adrian sighs, his other hand lifting of its own volition to push back through Trevor’s hair, to grip loosely there, to provide a point of grounding. “Don’t forget they were the victims of this. Don’t blame them. Blame the ones who did it.”

“I’ve _almost_ been the victim of a lot of things,” Trevor says, pulling away, turning. It’s abrupt, like he’s all at once unable to handle the closeness, but it’s not cruel. “I’m _still here_ because I was fucking paying attention.”

Somewhere nearby, a magpie alights in one of the trees surrounding the ruins; it calls roughly, harsh. All around them, such indelible destruction.

Adrian has never been clear on how exactly Trevor survived all of this, this inferno meant to cleanse the world of his family’s supposed taint. Trevor never talks about it. And Adrian wants him to, suddenly and desperately; wants to know every detail of how that scrap of a boy managed to evade such a determined effort to end his line, to endure hatred and hold onto life and keep going, always keep going, until fate brought him here to Adrian’s and Sypha’s sides—battered, damaged, but the bones of the man still intact. Salvageable. Like all of them.

What he actually says, watching Trevor’s back, watching his shoulders shake just that smallest bit, is: “And thank god for that.”

* *

“So,” Trevor says a while later; they’re out where the carriage house used to be, a less fraught part of the property. They’d accidentally wandered from the kitchen to the sitting room earlier, cast-iron fireplace tools and the wrought armrest of a chair still visible in the wreckage, and it hadn’t gone well. “Where did Sypha get off to?”

“An herbalists’s quest,” Adrian replies. “I tasked her a few weeks ago with tracking down a plant for me, one that helps fight against some of the more common winter ailments. She finally located a patch, was concerned about missing a harvest window if she didn’t move quickly. It’s a full day’s travel, so she left early this morning.”

Trevor hms. “Maybe being on the road will do her some good.”

“She does seem to miss it,” Adrian says, and he can hear his own unease in his tone. Perhaps it’s time to broach this. “And her family. I wonder sometimes if it’s fair, for her to be stuck here in one place. Or for you to be.”

Trevor shrugs, doesn’t deny it. “Well, what’s the alternative? We can’t just leave the place unguarded.”

“You could—”

“And we aren’t going to leave you alone here again,” Trevor cuts him off before he can suggest it. “So. You’re stuck with us.”

Adrian sighs. It’s as he worried; they _are_ getting restless, are masking it for his sake. “If that’s the case, then you’re only staying here for me.”

“Yeah,” Trevor admits, brash, without any hesitation. “We are. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

He can’t think of a sensible reply to that—of _course_ it’s wrong to be imposing on them, altering how they live their lives. And all for the sake of _his_ well-being. How can—

Trevor must mistake his horrified silence for something else, because he laughs. “Seriously, Adrian. Took me long enough to get it, but that’s what giving a shit _means_. We don’t all get our perfect, ideal little life that we thought we wanted. Maybe we get something better. This is a damn sight better than what I thought I wanted a year ago, which mostly involved large quantities of alcohol and the freedom to get drunk in peace.” He shrugs, careless. “So what if it means my boots don’t see as much road dirt? Small fucking price.”

He’s kicking up dust right now, toe of his boot dragging through the ash lying between the blackened foundation stones. Adrian is, quite suddenly, speechless.

“Anyway,” Trevor says, face twisting into a bittersweet grin. “You need to get used to being someone people will turn their lives upside down for." He pauses, looks Adrian in the eye. "It’s not like we’re going to be the last.”

And that’s exactly the wrong thing to say, or the wrong thing to _hear_ , but Adrian can tell that Trevor knew exactly the impact it would have, chose to say it anyway.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Adrian swears quietly, almost under his breath. It feels crass but also necessary, vital. He can feel the expression on his face, hollowed out and rigid, like a widower at a rainy winter funeral. “Do you honestly think...”

He can't say the words. He can't even let himself think about it—about a time in the world without them, about moving on, about finding someone else, in that distant and dismal future. He understands his father horrifyingly well, for just a moment.

“Oh, hell,” Trevor says after a second, and he sounds genuinely apologetic. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I did, but—”

Adrian fixes his gaze on the ground. “Let me summarize. You were trying to remind me that I have something good here, at the moment, and that as goodness is a finite resource, I should appreciate it while I have it. Failing to account for the fact that _loss_ is an ever-present variable in every calculation I run.” His voice sounds frighteningly flat even to himself—not angry, not hurt. Just _flat_. “Do you think there haven’t been moments when I looked at the two of you and saw nothing but the skull beneath the skin? Do you think the notion of someday having the love of some _stranger_ I haven't met yet is any kind of comfort, in the face of that?”

 _This is ridiculous_ , Adrian thinks. His father had loved a mortal for twenty years without moping performatively in front of her every twenty minutes, and Adrian should be capable of the same.  Still, he continues, voice thready: “Do you think you need to explain your own mortality to me?”

“No,” Trevor says, and for a second he looks genuinely hurt, before he wrings it out of himself like it’s poison, turns away. “I guess not.”

For a long moment they stand like that, silent. Adrian knows he’s overreacted, knows it keenly, but it’s like the thoughts that Trevor’s brought up are a knife in his throat, keeping him from speech, from breath. It wouldn’t be so devastating if he wasn’t so hopelessly—

Around them, an autumn breeze has kicked up. The seasons are turning, will keep turning, and no amount of willful ignorance or stubbornness will keep that wind at bay.

“I’m sorry,” Adrian whispers, barely audible. “I... I know you meant well.”

“Yeah, well,” Trevor says, looking at the ground. “Road to hell and all that.”

It takes Adrian another few moments to properly gather himself. “No. We’ve been on the road to hell once before. That’s not what this is.”

“Oh, yeah?” Trevor asks, turning his head to regard Adrian with a side-eyed smirk, and just like that, he knows he’s been forgiven. “Road to heaven, then?”

Adrian lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Banter, fine. Banter he can do. Get some distance from this. “Lately? I think it depends on how you define heaven.”

A sharp laugh. “I think this is probably the closest any of us are ever going to get.”

“Sacrilegious, Belmont.”

Trevor shakes his head. “You know us excommunicants. Always speaking heresy and swearing allegiance to the devil and, uh, fucking, I guess.”

“Constantly.”

“All day, every day.”

Adrian snorts; this is... comfortable. More comfortable than his own ruminations, anyway. He drops to his heels to get a better look at the layout of this place from closer to the ground—a child’s height. It looks larger, somehow. “I think you’re underestimating Sypha’s chances, honestly.”

“Oh, for—she literally called herself the _enemy of god_.”

“Regardless. She’s done a lot of good work. For us in particular.”

“Somehow I don’t think that dragging a heretic and a half-vampire into bed and ravishing them to within an inch of their lives counts as _good works_.”

Adrian chuckles, standing back up, brushing the dust from his trousers. “Perhaps not."

"Not that I'm ungrateful."

"Of course not. But does it ever seem odd to you, how she’s so—”

“Bossy?” Trevor suggests, mouth twisted into an affectionate grin; the words are harsh but it's clear he means exactly none of them. "Stubborn?"

Adrian rolls his eyes. “I was going to say ‘sexually assertive’.”

“Oh. Yeah, all right. You really just, throw that shit out there, don't you? No beating around the bush,” Trevor says, with an amused smirk. “But I don’t know. The Speakers, they dress the girls like boys—maybe they raise them that way, too. Far as I’m concerned, nothing wrong with teaching kids to go after what they want in life.”

“Certainly not. It’s just unusual.”

Trevor shrugs, hesitates. “Honestly? Kind of prefer it this way.”

That's... interesting. Not entirely unexpected maybe, but the openness is. At Adrian’s silence, Trevor looks up, expression guarded. “That surprises you?”

Adrian considers, eyeing Trevor up and down, taking in the stance, the ever-present weapons, the unapologetic display of his family crest. Confidence, pride, all very upfront and in one’s face. “It more surprises me that you'd admit it. You can be rather… aggressive otherwise.”

“I’m aggressive when I’m fighting. Because it’s _fighting_. Sort of how it’s supposed to be. If you’re not willing to go all in then what the hell are you even fighting for? But other things…” Trevor scratches at the back of his neck, almost sheepish. “Keep in mind, the women in my house weren’t delicate lasses. They fought and hunted, too. It was kind of an unspoken rule that you didn’t marry anyone into the family if they couldn’t kick your arse first.”

“And how long did they usually wait to figure that out?”

“Hah. Right away, usually. Lot of first meetings out in that sparring field. We weren’t much for traditional courtship, at least not in the last few generations.”

Adrian grins, sly. “Is that what _we_ were doing, under Greşit?”

A pause, followed by a disbelieving huff of laughter. “You know, I hadn’t thought about it like that. But yeah, a bit. Point is, that’s what I grew up with—everyone scrabbling to be in charge all the time, men and women alike, so maybe someone else calling the shots feels more natural to me than it should.” Probably more than he wants to _admit_ , if Adrian has his guess. “But it keeps me from—from accidentally overstepping, at least.”

Adrian knows that isn’t the sum of it—knows that Trevor has been told for over half his years that he’s less than worthless, that he deserves nothing, should want nothing, from people or from life. Knows that he can easily call Adrian’s needs unselfish but is paralyzed by the idea of demanding anything for himself. Knows, also, that there’s a terrible burden in always being expected to be in charge, in control, and that that burden falls to Trevor often enough on the battlefield as is.

He also knows that this isn’t the time to examine it. “Are you worried about that? It’s not as though she can’t stand up for herself.”

“Yeah, but would she? Would _you?_ Hell, Adrian.” He rubs a hand down his face, looks like he barely believes he’s saying this, and to Adrian of all people. “Do you understand that I have _no_ _fucking clue_ what I’m doing, here?”

“I don't know, you seem reasonably experienced. More so than I expected, honestly.”

Trevor shakes his head, makes a noise into his hand that is almost, but not quite, a laugh. “No, I don't mean— I'm not talking about the sex. I mean, sure, that's easy enough when it’s just some stranger in a tavern. You say what you want, they say what they want, if you’re in agreement you get to it." He spreads his hands as if to say  _there, done._  "It's all the rest of it."

"What rest of it, exactly?" Adrian has a sense of it, but it feels important to get Trevor to say these things aloud.

Which Trevor seems pretty resistant to at the moment, if the way his entire posture curls up is anything to go by. It's protective, shielding. "Look," he says, crouching in place, reaching to sift through the ash and dust with his fingers. Raking for secrets. "Don't make me— this isn't—"

Adrian levels an expectant look at him, with just a hint of steel.

"Augh, okay. All right," Trevor says, caving with ridiculous ease—or maybe Adrian's just that intimidating. It's not a possibility his ego is willing to count out. "Do you wanna take a stab," Trevor asks, not looking up, "at how many times I've taken someone to bed that I actually wanted to see again in the morning? Before you two, I mean."

Either far too many or far too few; Adrian isn't sure which way to swing it. "I wouldn't know where to start."

Trevor holds up a single finger, _still_ not looking up—and wonder of wonders, it's not  _that_ finger. "And that was when I was young and stupid enough to think it was something that could actually happen. I don't know." He shakes his head, flicks the ash off his fingers. "All of this emotional stuff makes it… complicated. _Good_ , better than anything I’ve ever had, but really complicated.”

Adrian sighs, because there is a part of this he understands far too well. “It does. It creates more room to worry that you might be coercing someone into something they don’t want.”

“Because they don’t want to hurt you by saying no, right.” He shakes his head. “I’m not used to this.”

A beat of silence. “…Trevor,” Adrian says, cautious, because it’s a question he almost doesn’t want the answer to. “Do _you_ feel coerced?”

It almost looks like Trevor’s going to laugh, but then he catches sight of Adrian’s expression, squelches it. “You mean with this, right?” he asks, reaching up to touch his neck. It’d been little but healed scabs until last night; there’s a fresh mark there now, and Trevor doesn’t seem inclined to hide it from view, though it’s low enough that he could with a little rearranging of his shirt’s collar. “No. Not at all. Don’t even worry about that—I pretty much have to push through every instinct I have to say _yes_ , which isn’t easy, so you for damn sure know I actually _mean_ yes.”

“Why, though?” Adrian blurts out before he can think better of it; it’s the part of this that’s had him the most befuddled. He’s been doing his best to minimize the pain, keeping it shallow and quick, but he doesn’t _need_ to be doing it at all. He just _wants_ it, with a fervor that makes his head spin with lust and his skin crawl with shame. “It can’t be pleasant.”

Trevor looks searchingly at him, then sighs, looks away. “I don’t know. Because _you_ enjoy it so much? There _is_ pleasure in that. And it’s not that bad as long as you’re not chomping down to save your life.” Trevor wanders a few steps away, running his hand along the splintered remains of a stair railing, taking the two stone steps that remain before they drop off into empty air. He's a little pinked up, obviously trying to distract himself from what he's saying; Adrian gets the distinct impression that under normal circumstances, he wouldn't be getting an answer at all. These things are not easy to talk about so openly. “The pain’s sort of… it’s kind of good, honestly." The pink flushes straight to red, but he pushes onward. "It _sharpens_ everything, makes it more intense. You know?”

Adrian has an inkling; last night he’d reigned in his impatience, had timed his bite for the moment they were both at that agonizing cliff’s edge before climax, and the keening sound Trevor had made when he’d broken skin had almost been a scream—but he can tell good screams from bad screams, these days, and so he’s willing to admit that there must be something enjoyable in there, somewhere.

Or perhaps Trevor is just unusual, with unusual hungers. Maybe Sypha will have some insight; she seems to enjoy these things for completely different reasons.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Trevor says, a quick laugh. He looks around himself, as if he expects to find a scolding ghost in every corner. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation _here._ If they could have seen this…”

“It’s not the most _tasteful_ place to discuss our sex life, no.”

Trevor takes a breath, lets it out. Drops down the two feet or so from the stairs. “No,” he says, looking up through the beams and broken stone columns, a little overwhelmed. “No, it’s perfect.”

Trevor, seemingly, has a strange definition of the word _perfect_. “Oh? How so?”

“This means something,” Trevor says, gesturing up to the part of the view that is still the most jarring: the wrecked watchtower of the Belmont estate and the spires of Dracula’s castle, sharing the same innocent patch of blue October sky. “Us… coming together like this. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hope we’re all just doing this because it’s what we _want_ , but. It’s also important, beyond just the three of us being lonely idiots. Being able to talk about this here? It _matters._ ”

Adrian finds himself holding his breath for a moment, startled by the openness. Then a slow nod, picking up in speed as he begins to understand. “This place is unique. Especially in this time.”

“I said it was both halves of _you_ ,” Trevor muses, thoughtful. “But it’s more than that. It’s both halves of _everything_.” Night and day, darkness and light, science and magic, all the forces that exist in careful balance in the world. “There’s a wall between those halves, yes? And most people can only live on one side or the other.”

“And usually don’t have much choice in the matter.”

“But we,” Trevor says, gesturing broadly. “Get to live _here_. Perched _right_ on top of that wall.”

“With an excellent view of both sides.”

“Yes.” Trevor takes a few more steps, casts out over the ruins as a whole, then to the castle beyond. Trying to see the big picture, maybe. "And of all the fucking stupid that's gone on in its name."

Then he turns back, faces Adrian directly, sobered. “The skulls bothered you, and I understand why. But do you have any idea how many of the Belmonts buried out there died with their throats torn out?”

This is treacherous territory. Adrian meets Trevor’s gaze, holds it steadfastly; it would be easy to be distracted by the marred stretch of _this_ Belmont’s throat, to slip down a dangerous guilt spiral, and he knows that isn’t Trevor’s point. “Probably just as many.”

Trevor nods, kicks at a bit of rock. “I know it’s complicated, and there were awful bastards on both sides. I know it’s not as simple as saying, ‘hey, if our ancestors had just fucked out their issues instead of fighting, none of this would have happened’.”

Adrian shakes his head, a smirk finding its way free despite the topic. “Your eloquent and tasteful way with words continues to amaze me.”

“Hey now, I’m actually _kind of_ serious. Some of the shit I’ve been reading, from way back in the family? Jesus, it really might have helped. But it wouldn’t have solved _everything_. And no, this won’t either. But…”

Mental note: track down the books Trevor had been using for his research; they sound fascinating. “I’m not sure any of us would have been ready for this, without the necessity of alliance pushing us together. At least for you and I, family prejudices ran terribly deep.”

Trevor shrugs. “Whatever. My family fucked off and died. You two stood with me.”

“Mn. ‘The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’.”

“Excuse me?” Trevor smirks, teasing. “Blood metaphors? Really?”

Adrian waves a hand, dismissing it. “It’s just a saying. About the importance of the family we choose to fight with versus that of the family we’re born into. Obviously a fraught topic for both of us.”

Family. An immortal and his mortal wife and their child, living in an unprecedented cocoon of peace. A granddaughter and her grandfather and all the people she loves who do their best to fill the generation-wide hole that shouldn’t be gaping between them. A sprawling line of siblings all vying for the attention of parents and aunts and uncles, living in cacophony while the constant threat of violent death tickles at their feet like a riptide.

The son of blood, the daughter of magic, the heir to all hunters. And a dead dog. Also a family.

Trevor takes a deep breath, spreads his hands to encompass the ruins. “Look. I guess I just… want to be able to live here again, but only if _you_ can live here too. And, ridiculous or not, I want to feel welcome in that castle, like I belong there as much as here. And I want Sypha to be able to invite her family here whenever she wants, and feel like she’s bringing them into her home, not putting them up in some inn. And…” he trails off for a moment, a new thought hitting him seemingly out of nowhere. “You know, from what I remember, that backwater down the hill doesn’t even have a _school_. We could…” he trails off, squinting through the ruins, maybe seeing the potential, overlaid on all of its broken bones. It’s a startling contrast to the defeated man he’d met under Greşit, only just remembering how to care at all.

It’s also unexpected, in this context. Adrian narrows his eyes. “You despise those people.”

A bark of laughter. “Yeah. I do. They’re all fucking cowards. But if their kids grow up a little less ignorant and afraid…” he waves his hand out over the ruins. “Maybe this kind of thing won’t have to happen again. Any of it.”

Adrian doesn’t immediately reply, tracing the foundation lines with his eyes. He can see how things could be divided up, how many possibilities there are, but it’s a little too blindly optimistic for him, too idealistic to have come out of Trevor’s mouth.

And yet.

He can see it, everything Trevor’s describing—two estates made one, with none of the _bad, wrong, go away_ that he feels in the hold, with none of the burned-in hostility the castle has for anyone who it’s decided doesn’t belong. With rooms full of Speakers a few weeks out of the year, during their midsummer solstice celebration maybe, and a place for learning, where all of the accumulated knowledge he’s been guarding so protectively can actually do some good…

There’s a knot in his throat; he does his best to swallow past it.

“How the hell,” Adrian asks finally, gesturing up at the tower, at the spires, “did we go from the erotic appeal of vampire bites to building a better tomorrow?”

Trevor laughs, and it’s the first time he’s looked genuinely at ease here—the first time within these crumbled walls that laughter has come easily and honestly, the first time Adrian’s been able to see something of the future in his eyes instead of just an endless replaying of the past.

“I’ve got no idea,” he says, grasping Adrian by the shoulder. “But it’s probably your fault.”

* *

The last of the daylight is fading through the trees, slanted and yellow and casting long, sharp shadows. Some of the leaves overhead are starting to turn; once the trees are bare, it will be much easier to spot intruders. They will have nowhere to hide. For now, Adrian still stalks ahead of the others, casting his superior hearing and smell out like a wide net in front of them.

He used to walk this circuit through the Belmont estate’s wooded perimeter alone, simply because he’d _been_ alone. Later, he walked it alone out of habit and the need for time to think. Ever since they’d all recovered from their ordeal with the hunter, he has not been able to convince them to leave him to it.

Still, they let him take point while they hang back to watch for side ambushes, and while he can’t let his mind wander too far, there’s space here for some introspection.

Behind him, he can hear them snickering about something, probably something idiotic that one of them has said because they knew it would make the other laugh. They’re good to each other, like that. Good to him. He still isn’t completely sure why—in his more lucid moments, he knows that he’s not the nicest person in this world. Honestly, he always knows that, but the lucidity brings with it an understanding that perhaps it’s something he should try to change. They have made such efforts on his behalf. Trevor has been out of his comfort zone for months, and Sypha…

Jokes about good works aside, they may have never even made it into his bed if not for Sypha. Their friendship might not have survived that screamingly horrible night in the library without her patience and kindness—he would have just kept saying awful things until they decided they’d had it with him and packed up to leave, this time forever. And he would have deserved it.

There’s a rustle in the bushes directly ahead of him. He freezes, holds his hand back toward the others, fingers spread in warning. Instant silence and stillness in response; he can just about _feel_ how intent their attention is, on him.

But no growl rises from the shadows, no crunch of branches snapping under a lumbering weight. Just the furtive, tinny little heartbeats of small creatures occupied in their daily life, which mostly consists of trying not to die. Adrian lowers his hand, shakes his head.

“Just animals,” he says, turning his head briefly toward them before picking up the pace again.

“Humping in the undergrowth?” Trevor asks, teasing.

“Probably not,” Adrian replies, choosing to take the question seriously. “Wrong time of year.”

“…oh,” Trevor says, sounding deflated. He’d probably been gearing up for a joke of some sort, and now it’s been derailed. Good. Right now, they are scouring their land for threats. It isn’t the time.

Ahead of him, a narrow, winding rivulet of water. It’s all that’s left of the stream, this far to the other side of the property; all of its other branches shoot off in other directions, heading for distant lands. Normally this is where they turn back—not because he has any difficulty with the anemic little brook, but because the edge of the property is near and the forest gets thicker from here, nigh impassible in high summer. Nothing could come at them from this direction without making noise, even a particularly stealthy vampire, so it’s usually enough to just pause and listen for a moment, smell the air, feel the way it moves.

And no matter how he chides the others, it’s easy to get lost in contemplations on these patrols—nothing of any note has happened for so long that they’ve become routine, and the fading light, warm and sharp, easily leads his train of thought astray. But something about the feel of the woods tonight is telling him to hone his senses, to refocus and pay attention _._ It isn’t danger, not exactly—more just an awareness of _intent_ surrounding them.

“What is _that_ thing?” Sypha asks, drawing up alongside him.

Wait. _What_ thing? Adrian pulls back his other senses, the ones occupied in searching for the sound of threat, the smell of it, the feel—and focuses on his vision instead.

There, across the brook, the thickest tree in the stand looks like it’s been flayed clear to the pale heartwood. Where the bark is cleared away, the wood glows faintly in the moonlight, and there are marks carved into it, possibly words. The script is too flowing to have been carved with a blade or a tool—only something preternaturally sharp could have managed it.

For some reason, Adrian thinks of the activating language of the distance mirror hidden away in the Belmont hold. But this is no ancient runic language, he realizes as he draws closer, treading heedlessly across the trickling stream. It’s—

“Trevor,” he says, feeling a few degrees colder. “How’s your French?”

“Rusty,” the hunter says, stepping past him to look more closely. “Wolves? Rings? Something. Can’t make out the rest.”

“Neither can I,” confirms Sypha. “It’s… an older dialect, from the look of it.”

Adrian nods, breathing out through his teeth. He had been right after all—it couldn’t have lasted. And even now, he hesitates, hanging on to the fleeting feeling of security and safety for just another second or two.

“Can I just say,” Trevor adds, “that whether I can read it or not, I don’t fucking like it?”

“‘The wolves are circling’, Adrian translates, despair in his voice, because he knows: these are the lean months, and that only ever serves to sharpen any predator’s appetites.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the content for THIS half of the Adrian POV section sprawled AGAIN and I had to cut it in half AGAIN. So you get three Adrian chapters in a row, my dears, and then we'll go back to Trevor for the wrap-up.
> 
> Some disclaimers:  
> 1) I know that the notion/saying of 'knowing someone biblically' did not exist in the 1400s. I don't care. Trevor demanded to be given that line and I could do nothing to dissuade him.  
> 2) YOU'RE THE CLOSEST TO HEAVEN THAT I'LL EVER BE yeah I'm a 90s kid sorry.  
> 3) You know that the fight under Gresit was basically a first date, Belmont style.  
> 4) Oh god Trevor what books have you even been reading, ~~did you find Leon's pink heart-covered diary or something~~  
>  5) I always try to write serious disclaimers and just end up babbling, and now I'm babbling about that fact, how very meta


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some unhealthy language surrounding mental illness, but nothing worse than Trevor's 'snake-fuckingly crazy' comment in the show.

*

There are things they can do, quietly, to prepare themselves for whatever is coming without losing themselves in it.

Adrian dries and steeps the herb Sypha retrieved for him in spirits, storing the resultant tincture alongside the bottles of medicine for pneumonia that his mother left behind; a good combination to have on hand for the coming cold months. But he also uses her notes to prepare salves, and soaks for bandages that prevent infection, and antidotes for common poisons. He reads up on treating injuries—is shaken to the core at the reminder of just how fragile the human body is, how easily the spirit can be shaken free, but knows that this knowledge could buy Trevor or Sypha the chance to live another day, should things go horribly wrong. He knows that they are both excellent fighters and there’s never been a serious injury between them—more than he can say for himself—but battle is unpredictable and anyone can make a mistake. His sword isn’t the only means he has to protect them.

Sypha refreshes the wards on the castle’s windows with more restriction—it’s going to be too cold soon to allow fresh air in anyway, and this will protect them from airborne attacks. Adrian presumes she means toxic gases or somesuch, but his mind also goes to the mist form that most vampires make much more use of than he does, and it’s a good precaution. She’s been reading into enchanting elements onto objects and while she’s started with household applications—fire-infused stones and metal ingots for cooking, ice-infused containers like the blood storage canisters downstairs but on a smaller, more portable scale—she’s been eyeing some of the weapons in the hold, the ones that look particularly suited to defense but lack consecration or any other special qualities. Adrian pictures Trevor going into battle with a flaming sword, finds that there are many parts of his brain and body alike that appreciate the image immensely.

Trevor, for his part, spends less time sparring one-on-one and more time practicing with straw bales tied into vaguely human shapes—keeping up his precision, with the Morning Star more often than not, which can only be used against things that are not alive or which he wants to stop from being alive. He disappears some days into the woods, under the pretense of hunting but always in the direction of that strange carved missive, and while he usually comes back with game he’s also usually unsettled, and unwilling or unable to explain why. He throws himself into dealing with his spoils, prepping the meat and draining off the blood to keep those canisters filled; by the time he’s got the hare or venison or whatever it is cooked up for dinner, the unease has worked its way out of his system.

As for the message in the woods, they have been unable to agree on its purpose. Sypha wants to believe it’s a warning, from someone sympathetic who is looking out for them. Adrian’s been quick to point out the high probability that the elegant, handwriting-like carving was etched by a vampire’s talons, which makes a friendly warning less likely; he’s leaning toward veiled threat. Trevor tends to just laugh at them both for taking it at face value—he’s convinced it’s a red herring, a distraction, something put there to keep them looking in the wrong direction.

“Most vampires aren’t that strategic or subtle,” Adrian counters, the next time it comes up. It’s a grey afternoon out in the practice area, clouds scudding low across the horizon. It feels like rain. “They don’t need to be. With a few notable exceptions.”

Trevor pulls the chain whip back toward himself; it leaps from the air and coils into his hand with a perfect, effortless grace that becomes more uncanny the more times Adrian sees it. But then, Adrian’s weapon of choice literally floats alongside him, so maybe he has no room to be skeptical. The bale Trevor had put himself up against hadn’t stood a chance; charred bits of straw float down on the breeze like snow or ash, and the air around them fairly hums with energy.

“Then we’ve got an advantage, don’t we?” Trevor asks, catching his breath. “Because we _are_.”

“You are, at least,” Sypha teases. “I haven’t seen any proof of tactical skill on my or Adrian’s part.”

“I never laid claim to any,” Adrian says, refusing to be baited. “Though my father was apparently very talented in that area, once upon a time. We don’t inherit all our ancestor’s gifts.”

“I don’t know,” Trevor says, hooking the chain to his belt where the whip usually resides. “We took out a room full of damn powerful vampires without a word of coordination. One bad decision could have been the end of any of us. We’re still here. I’d say that makes us all pretty good.”

“Says the man who tried to punch Dracula in the face,” Adrian says, half-serious. “If I hadn’t been there—”

“Oh, I would have been toast,” Trevor admits, shameless. He’s trying to be flippant, but there’s a haunted hollowness in his voice. “That was not my most brilliant moment.”

 _Toast,_ he says, like death means so little. Adrian remembers how horrified he’d been, realizing that Trevor was a half-second from having his heart ripped clean out; they’d found enough dead vampires on their way to the study, twitching and bleeding out from the gaping holes in their chests, and that’s how it would have ended for the last Belmont—dead on the floor of Dracula’s castle, barely thirty seconds into the fight.

But then, Adrian isn’t sure how Trevor had managed to even get upright again in the first place, after being plowed into with the force of twenty men; Adrian had smelled the blood he was coughing up, knew the man was hurt badly somewhere inside. A dismal, practical voice in his head had told him that Trevor would not survive long after the fight, even if he lived to see the end of it.

Clearly a morbid misjudgment on his part; it hadn’t even come up, after, and here they are half a year later, no worse for wear. Physically, anyway.

“It was not,” Adrian agrees, a simple statement of fact, for once finding he has no stomach for the teasing. “But we’ve all made mistakes.”

“I nearly set Adrian’s hair on fire,” Sypha says, perversely proud. “ _That_ would have been awful.”

“And my first attempt ended with me being swatted across the room like a fly,” Adrian adds. “None of us were any good on our own, it seems.”

“That,” Trevor says, as the first drops of rain start to fall, patterning the dusty ground around them with dark, coalescing spots, “will be important to remember. You want proper tactical advice? Here’s the first piece: we don’t try to do this shit on our own. Whatever this is, we meet it as a unified front.”

“Yes,” Sypha says, an echo of her determination in the castle’s main hall, before they took on his father’s generals—and Adrian knows that this time, their unknown enemy has more to fear than they do.

* *

Come the day that there’s a knock on the front door.

Describing it that way feels trivializing; there’s an echoing ring of wood on metal that fills the main hall and rushes along to wind its way into every other nook and cranny in the castle. But at its heart, that’s what it is: a knock on the door.

It’s mid-afternoon. Adrian’s frowning over a chessboard that they’ve set up in an alcove off of one of the main hallways; with all of its windows thrown open, it resembles nothing so much as a solarium, and he has wondered what purpose it was originally meant to serve. But like this, it’s nice; Sypha’s even brought in some potted plants with broad, streaky, heart-shaped leaves, and they’re starting to go a bit wild, spreading through the space like jungle vines.

Adrian is frowning because he’s just unexpectedly lost his second bishop to a bizarre flank attack that is now forcing him to choose between his queen and his last knight. The choice itself is obvious, but he’s annoyed at being forced to make it; when he glances up across the board, Trevor looks smug as fuck. The man has proven far more adept at this game than Adrian had expected, though with an unpredictable, disorganized style that makes it all the more infuriating to lose to him.

But: the knock. Adrian feels himself alert, sees Trevor’s grin slip into something flatter, more cautious. It’s not going to be vampires, not in broad daylight. But they’re on edge, and it could still be servants or thralls or fighters, sent to try to catch him flat-footed on the assumption that he’s as useless in the daytime as they are. It could be the church, finally gotten around to investigating all the rumors. It could be anything.

“Stay back a bit,” Adrian says, setting the piece he’d been twiddling between his fingers back down where it came from. “No point showing all our strength at once. Be ready to back me up if necessary.”

When they’d first met, Trevor might have balked at being designated as backup, ego insisting he be the first one into every fight. Now he just nods solemnly, unhooking his whip from his belt and following Adrian to the arch leading down to the grand hall, but no further.

On the staircase, Adrian hesitates. There are mechanisms for opening the door from afar, and he’d intended to do just that—intimidate, retain some distance and a position of strategic power. But he’s listening hard, and there’s only a single human out there. They sound nervous and afraid, pacing back and forth, pulse a jackhammer. Maybe a more personal approach would yield better results? His companions would throw a fit over him walking into such a vulnerable position, but Adrian has confidence in his ability to handle this.

He makes up his mind—strides to the massive metal doors, and leans into one of them hard, easing it outward a hair.

On the landing, what looks like a village girl. She jumps back as the door cracks open, eyes meeting Adrian’s unerringly despite the pall of shadow inside the entryway. They widen, real fear settling in where startlement had made room, had jangled up all the nerves and gotten the adrenaline flowing.

All right, then. Not a threat, most likely, though Adrian keeps his ears out for any sign of this frightened creature being a distraction, or bait. He’s seen more heartless ploys than that. The door creaks ominously as he pushes it further, letting the sunlight spill over and past him; humans seem to like that, to find it disarming when he doesn’t lurk in shadows.

“My apologies for the wait,” he says, soothing. “The place is rather large, and we don’t really get visitors. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I…” she says, clutching at the walking stick she’s carrying; she’s unremarkable-looking for the most part, no dangerous weapons, no aura of magic or enthrallment. Just a girl, maybe sixteen, thin blue scarf over her hair, completely typical town clothing for the season. She smells strongly of fear. “Could you… tell the master of the castle—”

“I’m not a servant,” Adrian interrupts, still with that same soothing tone. “You can speak to me directly.”

“O-oh.” She swallows tightly, gaze dropping to take in his admittedly casual manner of dress, then coming up again to settle on his face. She doesn’t seem to want to meet his eyes. “I meant no offense…”

“None taken.”

“I’m from Acasă, the town below?” She seems to steel herself then, takes a deep breath. “I’m looking for information about what happened to my father. He died in this area a few months ago, we found him outside the town gate. Everyone says it must have been the monsters, but I…”

Oh. Oh hell.

“I need to know what happened,” she continues, voice shaky with an audible attempt to bolster her resolve. “I’ve talked to everyone else I could think of who might have seen something, you’re all that’s left. And they told me not to come here, that it was too dangerous, but…”

Adrian closes his eyes for a moment. They’d known this was eventually going to come home to roost, no matter that they’d roughed up the man’s injury before leaving him by the gate, made it look less obviously like a sword strike. Sypha had wanted to burn the body, but they had decided letting him be properly buried in accordance with church traditions would be a greater comfort to any family he had, so the roadside it was, under cover of night. But small towns are too closely knit for anyone to die mysteriously and have no one ask questions.  He’d just been expecting more along the lines of a mob, the usual torches and pitchforks—not a grieving daughter, essentially a child, come alone and helpless to his door.

He wedges himself into the door, pushes it far enough open that she can pass through. He has no earthly idea what they are going to say to her; he thinks he has never been so unprepared for a moment in his life.

“Of course,” is what he manages, for now. “Please, come in.”

Back in the hall, it’s dimmer than outside even with all the open windows. It’s a reprieve, a space in which he can quiet his mind and gather his thoughts. Once the door is closed and the girl is following a terrified three steps behind him, he takes a breath, steadies himself.

“Belmont?” he calls; if they’re to address him as Alucard in mixed company, he can at least offer the same respect.

Trevor steps out from behind the arch, whip in hand, regarding the scene before him with no small degree of suspicion. No wonder: he’s been summoned but there’s nothing here to fight.

“Could you please go find Ms. Belnades and meet me in the room we just came from?”

“…all right,” Trevor says slowly, side-eying the girl. “What for?”

 _Some long overdue closure for this poor girl_ , he thinks. “I’ll explain once we’re all there.”

* *

So they sit with her in the alcove-turned-solarium, chairs pulled away from the chessboard, the air thick with the smell of greenery. Her name is Maila, she says, and she describes her father, describes how and where he went missing, days before they found him. And of course: it fits their assailant to the last detail.

Adrian folds his hands, rests his chin on them. Thinks, carefully, and this is a hard balance—he wants to gather his thoughts, but if he stays silent too long then one of the others will jump in and, well-meaning as they are, this feels like something Adrian needs to handle himself. It had been his skin on the line, after all, his life that this girl’s father had been killed to save. Had he deserved it? Probably. Is that the tack to take? Absolutely not.

Maila’s eyes don’t waver from his, even as she sits there shaking.

“I’m not going to dance around this,” Adrian says, doing his best to soften his manner where the words cannot help but be harsh. “Your father died on our land.”

He isn’t sure what he expects; maybe for her to burst into tears, to crumple, to explode in fury. She doesn’t do any of those things, just grits her teeth, closing her eyes for a moment. She takes a breath, then opens them.

“So you know what happened, then,” she says, throat tight. “That’s… good, I suppose.”

It isn’t _good_ , but there’s no better way to put it; as Adrian said before, there are no words for this. He just nods, waits for her to continue in her own time.

“Will you… _tell me_ what happened?” she asks after a moment, and now her voice is starting to sound like tears.

Trevor shifts somewhere behind him, discomfort with the idea obvious. But they have come this far, and Adrian will not disrespect the decision Trevor had been forced to make by pretending it didn’t happen. “We think he tracked a group of demons onto our property. He engaged them there, and we decided to support him in the fight. But once they were defeated, he… seemed to become confused as to who his opponents were.”

“He turned on us,” Trevor clarifies, because he doesn’t really do diplomacy but sometimes that isn’t what’s called for.

A breath of silence, then Maila says something sharp under her breath, something that could almost be a curse. “Did he say why?”

Adrian frowns; he’s admittedly surprised that she’s just taking their word for this. He’d expected her to question it, to argue that her kin would never have done such a thing, to accuse them of lying. “Not… as such. He didn’t like Belmont, for somewhat obvious reasons. And he _very much_ didn’t like me. He made a very serious attempt on my life, nearly succeeded.”

She bites her lip, shakes her head. “That sounds about right.” She sighs, pained. “So it wasn’t the monsters. It was self-defense.”

“I gave him the chance to walk away,” Trevor says, subdued, a little defensive. “But he just kept _coming_. I didn’t have a choice.”

A long silence, then. Maila seems to be studying the tile pattern on the floor, an intricate Turkish design in three shades of blue. Sypha reaches across to set a hand on her shoulder; it’s a gutsy move, but she has always been able to read a room better than they could. The touch sets off something that runs through the girl like a full-body sob.

“The reasons do not make it easier,” Sypha acknowledges, quietly.

“No.”

“But it is important for you to know.”

“Then you should know that he was… sick,” Maila says, touching her own forehead to clarify. Sick in his mind. Mad. “But we didn’t know how bad it had gotten. He was obsessed with you,” and here she looks to Trevor, “Or, really, with your family. He saw things sometimes, heard things. We would go to church and he’d say the sermon was full of messages only for him, from God—as if our current priest were anything but a charlatan, anyway.” She’s gotten a bit distant, eyes unfocused on the tile, lost in painful reminiscence. She shakes her head, snapping back to the present. “I’m sorry that you were forced to deal with him in this way. And ashamed, on behalf of my family.”

Sypha shakes her head, giving Maila’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “It is illness; we do not choose to become ill. The situation was regrettable, but there’s nothing for you to apologize for. Or be ashamed of.”

“I’m sorry it ended the way it did,” Trevor adds, guarded, and Adrian knows it for the half-truth it is; this girl’s father had helped kill all of the Belmonts that night fifteen years ago, and Trevor had shed no tears for his death. Nor should he. But there is personal regret and then there is understanding that there might have been a better outcome, and the difference between them is something Trevor seems to understand more soundly, these days. “I don’t imagine he left the house that day aiming to murder anyone.”

“No. He just wanted to protect us from the monsters.” A tear hits the tile, silent. “I… thank you,” she says, scrubbing at the tears. “For returning him to us, and for telling me the truth. You could have just… blamed the monsters, anyone would have believed it.”

“That would be a disservice to everyone involved,” Adrian says, understanding the truth of it even as he says it. Maila; her mad, sick father; Trevor; Adrian himself; even Sypha, who had to deal with the aftermath, who had to bandage Trevor and help Adrian out of blood-stiffened clothes and go back out alone to get the knife, to freeze the body while they decided what to do with it.  If the truth brings a vengeance mob to their door, so be it; they can handle it. But he doesn’t expect it to happen.

Maila looks up at them—at Adrian specifically, gaze boring into him with an intensity she hasn’t shown to this point. He’s acutely aware, in this moment, of his otherness, his strangeness. “You… you _are_ unusual. And with this castle being… I can see why my father might have thought…”

Then she looks up at the array of windows all around them, sunlight streaming in relentlessly. “But he was obviously wrong. Again, I’m sorry his madness forced this on you. I… I should return to my family.”

“One more thing,” Trevor cuts in, as she’s shuffling to her feet. “Have there really been a lot of monsters in the town?”

It’s a good question; aside from that one group of the things, they’ve seen no sign of them up here on the estate grounds.

Maila nods. “Yes. There aren’t as many, but they’re wilder now, and they show up all hours of the day and night, with no pattern to it.” She hesitates, then continues: “We could certainly use your help.”

“Yeah, well,” Trevor says, scratching at the back of his neck, distaste snarling up his features. “Not sure if that’s really in the cards. That little thing where they don’t want me here.”

“There are not many who still believe as my father did,” she replies, a little tearful still but cutting straight to the heart of it. “When the monsters first came, many people realized that they had made a terrible mistake in siding with the church to betray your family. And now…” She trails off, makes a frustrated noise. “…the young people especially, we know what has been happening. We know whose castle this was, and we know why the monsters are so disorganized and why their numbers keep thinning.”

She stands up as straight as she can, looks Trevor in the eye, then Sypha, then Adrian. “We know that you stopped the end of all things. We, at least, are grateful. And many of the others regret their mistake.”

“They still made it.” Trevor says, because this is about his family, and it isn’t something a _whoops, sorry_ can fix. “It can’t be unmade.”

“Corrupt and selfish men made the mistake, and then forced it on to the others through fear.”

“That’s convenient.”

“The church is less powerful now than it has been in many years. Allow the people the chance to make their own choices,” she continues; she has faced the worst today already, and clearly Trevor’s ancient bitterness is nothing compared to that. “They may surprise you.”

* *

“Well,” Trevor says, after Adrian returns from escorting Maila out. “That… happened.”

“It went better than I expected,” Adrian replies, stepping to a window. The plant there is getting overgrown, and he picks through it, rooting out dead brown leaves. He recognizes it as a nervous behavior, allows himself the indulgence. “I honestly expected that conversation to end with her rounding up a mob to burn down the castle.”

“They can try,” Sypha says, the magic in her hands sparking warningly.

“Oh, they’d never succeed.” Dead leaves taken care of, he touches a fingertip to the soil; it’s cool, faintly moist. Good. “This is by far the safest place to be in the event of a peasant revolt.”

“Good to know,” Trevor grumbles; it’s clearly not the side of that equation he’s used to finding himself on.

“So,” Sypha says, careful. “He was… mentally compromised. That explains a lot.”

“You can just say ‘insane’. And if that’s what we’re blaming it on,” Trevor says, sounding skeptical, “then he must have been like that for a really long time. Decades.”

Adrian nods, crossing his arms over himself. “I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time madness has driven a man to such evil as he cannot survive it.”

A stretch of silence then; he’s not being subtle, and he knows it. He shakes his head, shakes out his posture, dismisses it. “It’s interesting that the night creatures have been staying clear of the castle.”

“Yeah, can’t imagine why,” Trevor says, sarcasm mild and habitual. “What do you think about the rest of what she said?”

“About the villagers possibly being receptive to your return? I honestly have no idea; she’s only the second I’ve met, and the first didn’t make a good impression. But the possibility of even tenuous allies is tempting, in light of the last few days. It may be worth a try, if we can come up with a solid strategy. Sypha?”

Sypha is standing over the chessboard, hands fisted on her hips. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think, that whichever of you is playing white? Is in serious trouble.”

“Who the hell do you _think_ is playing white?” Adrian asks, irritation flaring as he drops back into the chair on that side of the board. “And yes, I agree. Unfortunately.”

“Going to forfeit, then?” Trevor asks, and it’s lacking its usual tease; things are still feeling dour.

Adrian narrows his eyes at the board. “No. I don’t make a habit of giving up.”

“What I actually think,” she says, pulling her chair up alongside Adrian’s; she enjoys doing this, providing a fresh set of eyes and a novel sense of strategy for whoever happens to be losing. It isn’t _fair_ , per say, but it’s made all three of them into better players. “Is that the two of you need to meet more of those people before you make any assumptions. People change, their ideas and outlooks and the way they see the world, it all changes. And fifteen years is a long time.”

Trevor nods, reluctant, ceding to the wisdom of her words if not exactly at ease with them.

“Then that is what we’ll have to do,” Adrian agrees, reaching to pick up the piece from before—making his move decisively, come whatever may.

Because no—giving up isn’t in any of their natures, and neither is sitting idly in wait for fate to decide their future for them. Maybe it’s time to prove that.

* *

Trevor’s strange dream of flowers and betrayed endings is not the only recurring story sleep has been telling recently. Adrian’s been suffering them as well, for months. Most of them are distressing, disorienting, ruthless, but a few of them are kind, and here is one: a warm summer morning on a stone balcony overlooking the dawn, the slight figure of Lisa Țepeș tucked up close to his side.

Really, _dream_ doesn’t feel accurate, because the space Adrian finds himself in is a lucid one, hospitable to clear thought, not immersive and threaded through with raw emotion the way most of his dreams are. He knows where he actually is: in bed with Sypha and Trevor, lulled to sleep by the sound of rainfall, in an inherited castle resting over the old Belmont estate—just south of the village of Acasă. He knows that it is 1476, and that his parents are gone, and so standing here alongside his mother feels more like a balm than a cruel tease.

The doors behind them are thrown open, so this must be his mother’s suite, the one she kept separate so she could let the sun stream into it as she wished. He spent countless mornings out here with her, first as a child, then as an awkward teenager, then as a young adult just _becoming_ , slouching against the low stone wall in order to not loom over her. It had felt wrong, becoming taller than her, even though they all knew it was bound to happen.

Early on, it had just been a ritual they enjoyed, time they could spend together. Later, it felt important to share in these moments—to prove to her and to everyone else that even as his powers increased, as he inherited more and more of his father’s heritage and became increasingly strange to the human world, he could still stand here with her and watch the sunrise.

“What are you thinking?” she asks, gently. It’s a question he anticipates, but she sounds more real than Adrian had expected her to. It hurts, also more than he expected.

“Many things,” he says, watching the horizon lighten. This is a script, but a comforting one.

“That’s been your answer a lot, lately.”

“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

A hand brushing a rebellious strand of his hair back then, far too solid where it grazes his temple, and he has to close his eyes. “It hurts, sometimes,” she says. “Seeing you so grown-up, so burdened.”

He huffs a small laugh; she has no idea how she lightens his burdens just by being here. “That is a thing that happens to everyone, eventually.”

“It just happened so quickly, for you,” she says, sorrow underlining her affection. “I would have liked to have seen you a child for longer.”

 _But I suppose that was never to be,_ Adrian completes in his head, waiting.

But it never comes. Instead: “I would have liked to have continued to be your mother.”

He looks up, startled, hurt rippling through him like vertigo. “I… but… you will _always_ be my mother.”

“Perhaps,” she says, and her smile—god, her smile. “But a mother is not what you need, anymore.”

He takes a careful breath; a few words exchanged that he wasn’t expecting and suddenly this is uncharted territory. He feels abruptly, horribly exposed. “What is it that you suppose I need?”

“A way to find _your own_ _happiness_ ,” she says, forceful, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Whether that is through meaningful deeds, or companionship, or whatever other path you may find.”

Down below, in the forest, there’s movement; a flock of shimmering, black and gold fish emerge from the undergrowth, blue-edged tails streaming like war banners, weaving through the air. It’s dream nonsense, and he could will it away, but in the spirit of these new waters he’s treading, he allows them to stay—watches them weave and bob, all agility and grace.

“Then I should probably say that I _have_ found some companionship,” he says, tracking the flock with his eyes. “I’m finding it… more agreeable than I have in the past.”

“I’m glad,” she says, quiet, shoulder-to-shoulder with him against the stone. “And not surprised. I knew there was someone out there for you.”

Adrian smiles, because of course she did. “You would like them. Father didn’t, but you would have.”

“My goodness,” she says, smiling in mock surprise, playing at being scandalized—because of course she already knew. “‘Them’?”

“Yes,” he says, and he will not be ashamed of this. “Strong and brave and honorable, both of them.”

“And good to you?”

He thinks about Trevor burying the skulls, and teasing him about the wine but always remembering, and drawing his fears and insecurities out under the observatory’s arc of stars, and making spice rolls to say ‘I want this to be home.’ He thinks about Sypha spending days researching the knife, just so that they would better understand the threat it posed to him, and inviting him to tell them all the stories he carried of his family and their happiness, and hauling him down to the garden, teaching him how to dirty himself in the earth and come away from it feeling cleaner.

He thinks about the pain of bleeding out in that field, the searing blade of the sun boring into his skull while Trevor’s voice got further and further away, like something disappearing down a tunnel—being forced to consider the real possibility that this might be his end. Thinks about the way they had given everything they had to haul him back from that brink.

He doesn’t _have_ to remember these things, to answer her question. But it feels nice, to think about them. “None better in all the world.”

“That’s enough for me, then. And anyway, it’s no surprise your father didn’t approve; first impressions are hard to overcome, and they _were_ trying to kill him.”

“Yes, well. To be fair, so was I.” A slow breath, centering. “Mother, can you ever forgive me for that? Or at least understand why I had to do it?”

Silence, stretching, straining. The fish do a sort of tumbling somersault, disappearing back into the forest.

“Adrian,” she says, pained and low. “You know as well as I do that this is only a dream.”

Which means that any forgiveness she grants is just wishful thinking on his part, or worse, is him forgiving himself on her behalf. Unconscionable. “Of course. I know. I had to ask.”

She says nothing, just leans into his side, her warmth all at once overwhelming. It’s like she carries the heat of the pyre with her, and Adrian nearly chokes.

“I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, right now,” he forces past it. “I was going to go back to sleep, to finally end this bloodline for the sake of the world.” His mother wouldn’t like that, but this isn’t really her, and he has to get this out before he loses that clarity. “Instead, I’m playing house in the castle he waged his war from, while the world is, if not actively burning, at least still throwing cinders. I won’t pretend there’s no value or strategy in building up strength and resources, but is this the right path? Is it a path at all? Or am I just treading water?”

“There is no _right path,”_ she says, and there’s humor in her voice. “Your path is yours to find. The world is in need of a lot of things; how you can best serve it is up to you. I never expected you to become a doctor like I was, and your father didn’t expect you to rule like he did.”

“It always felt like he did.”

“He did his best to _prepare_ you for it, in case life forced you into that role. And he hoped. But he did not _expect_ it, not really. My god, Adrian. You could have come to us and said you were joining a roving theater troupe, and we would have supported you.”

“In that moment, _and_ when I inevitably stumbled back home, completely destitute and all my dreams dashed against the rocks.”

She laughs, and oh, he remembers that sound. “Just so.”

Out over the horizon, the sun is half-risen, white-gold and spectacular, banded all around by pink and orange and violet, rippled through the low-hanging clouds. On the edges of the sky, a brilliant blade of blue is cutting in from either side, the approach of true day.

“I don’t know if either of you would support me in what I’m doing now,” he says. It’s one thing for his dream-figment mother to be blasé about him shacking up with the pair who’d helped him kill his own father; reality is always messier, less forgiving. “Or what I might have to do.”

“And what is that?”

If he knew the answer to _that—_ but no. He bites back a blast of frustrated irritation. This is him, asking questions of himself; he has no one else to blame for the hard ones. “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet. But we’ve gotten a… warning, or a threat, and I may have to dabble a bit in my father’s sphere,” he says, regretful even as he realizes the truth of it. “Establish a presence in the power structure, if nothing else. Draw a few lines in the sand.”

She turns her head to one side, concern flitting across her features. “To protect your companions?”

He looks off into the distance, thoughtful. That isn’t _quite_ … “No. They can stand up for themselves, at least as well as I can. But we stand a better chance collectively if we are active and aware—if we know what’s coming.” There are too many unknown variables and undiscovered threats; originally, he’d thought that it would be better to lie low, avoid notice. But that obviously isn’t possible anymore, and with Trevor and Sypha here now… Adrian shakes his head. “I trust them to defend themselves. But there are things none of us should have to defend ourselves _against_.”

“You really do respect them. As equals.”

Adrian hadn’t spent a lot of time considering it, but he supposes that if his dream is saying it then it must be true; it certainly _feels_ true. “Yes, I do.”

She nods, looks at him. Her eyes are so blue; he’d been jealous as a young child, that he hadn’t gotten those from her. Back then, he didn’t understand that beauty comes in many forms, is not solely defined by the person you love before you can speak. “That’s good. Respect is almost as important as love. I remember that girl from Lupu you were courting for a while…”

“Oh, god,” Adrian says, smiling through the embarrassment. “Cara. I was so young. What was I, thirteen?”

“Yes. And she a bit older, though you wouldn’t have known to look at the two of you.”

Adrian nods; he had been physically closer to sixteen or so at that point, cognitive capacity in that area as well, and humans tended to lose track when they didn’t see him often. That was back when he was just _Adrian_ , just the doctor’s boy with the strange eyes. He wouldn’t be _Alucard_ for a number of years, not until superstition got the better of the people and his nature became harder to hide.

“You were… sweet, together,” his mother says. “But…”

“But she couldn’t have lifted a hand in her own defense, had it come to it.”

“You always did prefer people who could fight.”

He hangs his head, frowning. “Put that way, it sounds horribly shallow, if not downright primitive.” And far too similar for comfort to that practice of the Belmonts—don’t fall for anyone who can’t beat you in a straight fight. And beyond that, it had led him into a few unpleasant places; people like that had a tendency to be harder than he really liked.

“Not at all,” she says, shaking her head. “This is a hostile world, Adrian. More so now than it was then. Still good at its core, I truly believe that, but dangerous. I would never tell you to put more hostility out into it, but part of you comes from a proud, independent culture. They don’t coddle. They protect those they love, but they find it hard to love those who constantly require protection.”

It’s painful beyond words, but he says it: “You needed protection in the end.”

“And yet,” she says. “Your father felt me capable enough that he left me to handle my own affairs while he travelled. I did not cower under his wing. That I did not have his protection when I needed it just once… well, unfortunately, once is all it takes.”

Adrian sucks a breath through his teeth. He is so close to tears that he dares not even try to speak.

“Adrian… you will do what you need to, to keep yourself and your companions safe. You will find clarity in your path. Just don’t lose your _self_ in it. You’re one of the gentlest people I’ve ever had the joy to know, and I was always proud of the fact that I had a hand in that. It’s precious, and it makes you unique in all the world. Don’t lose it.”

“ _Unique_.”

“Yes,” she says. “I will not pretend otherwise. You’re singular in a place and time that values sameness; you have a hard lot. There is not a good thing in this world that you do not deserve, and yet I know that this heritage we gave you makes it hard for you to realize that.”

Adrian looks down at his hands on the stone, laughs bitterly.

“What?” she asks, smile in her voice.

“You yourself said it: this is just a dream,” Adrian says. “So what is this, me giving myself an inspirational speech?”

She looks at him for a long moment, kindness in her eyes. “There is such a thing as truth we _know_ but struggle to acknowledge.”

Adrian takes a deep breath, deeper than he needs, and looks out over the landscape again from this stunningly high vantage point. Everything should be visible from here; nothing should be hidden, obscured. And yet there are so many dark spots that he can’t see into—the forest, the depths of that twisting creek, the shadows of all of Trevor’s ruins, cast on the ground like wraiths, like old, darkened bones.

When he turns back to his mother, she is just the opposite: brilliance and clarity and openness and transparency and—oh. She’s disappearing, isn’t she? The dream itself is unravelling, coming apart at the seams, light pouring through the cracks like water.

Without thinking about it, he leans in and gathers her against him before she can fade completely, an embrace missing from his life for the better part of two years. She hugs him back just as desperately, as if he were still six years old, terrified to tears after a run-in with a church man in the woods, needing all the reassurance in the world that no, he’s not a monster and no, he doesn’t deserve to burn in hell for all time. That he is good, and that he is _loved_.

Then there’s nothing at all in his arms except air, and nothing beneath his feet or around him but air, and he hangs there for a moment before deciding: _time to wake up._

* *

Lying there in his warm, human-filled bed, the scent of his lovers permeating every thought and filling him with a ferocious need to protect them at all costs, it’s a hard thought to hold onto: _Be gentle. Be just. Be kind. Trust them, and take them into the dark places with you, so that all of you may continue living in the light._

_Trust them, and let them show you just how loved you really are._

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY THE DREAM I'VE BEEN WANTING TO POST THE DREAM FOR SO LONG
> 
> gentle baby gets dream advice from his dead dream mom, news at 11
> 
> Also: I will fight anyone who tries to convince me that booksmart Adrian (who fights in proper fencing form oh god baby loosen up) is better at chess than master tactician and improviser Trevor fucking Belmont. I imagine their games have a bit of a Kirk and Spock vibe, though Adrian's a lot more willing to curse out Trevor's mad strategic genius and generally threaten to flip the table when he's losing. Which is most of the time.


	12. Chapter 12

*

The Acasă evening market is a riot of light and colors, candles burning behind tinted glass, stalls that house fruits and vegetables and chickens and textiles by day now joined by new ones, wedged in wherever they fit, selling mugs of hot, strong cider and pastries and all manner of meat on sticks, among stranger delicacies. The sunset is watery and noncommittal, like the sun’s feeling guilty for slacking off so much lately and is hoping to slip out the back door unnoticed.

Honestly, Trevor understands. Not like he’s never done the same.

They're here—disguised in vague ways meant to not attract attention, but Trevor's still on edge, is trying hard not to recognize anyone else in turn—to do as Maila and then Sypha had suggested. Get to know the place. Get to know the people. Collect information. See if they really are ready to make their own decisions.

If you want information, Trevor figures, you go to the marketplace. 

* *

“You’ve heard the rumors, yeah?” the man selling day-old bread and dried out carrots says, as these three nondescript strangers feign interest in his goods. “About the Belmont?”

“Wait,” Trevor says, looking up from some very sad parsnips with a look of, he thinks, perfectly convincing shock. “There’s a _Belmont?”_ There we go, fucking brilliant. He should be on a stage.

“Oh, aye,” the man says, scratching at his nearly bald pate. Right over the bin of vegetables. “But we’ve known that for, oh, about a year, now.” And okay, that’s bullshit. It hasn’t even been a year yet since they came back for the hold. “No,” the man continues. “The new thing people is saying is, that he ain’t really a survivor. That he’s a _ghoul_ or something. Revenant, maybe. Haunting the ruins.”

Adrian leans in, curiously. “...that’s a strange rumor,” he says, and Sypha’s magicked up a glamour that has his eyes looking like something between green and blue, but he still has to be careful of his teeth, when he’s talking. “Why are they saying that?”

“Some folks have gone up there to the old estate, they’ve seen him, and they say he looks dead as your granddad’s dog. _Reliable_ folk, mind.”

“Anyone know what he looks like?” Trevor asks, smirking, because clearly this guy doesn’t. This is the important part: sifting through the obvious crap and getting to what people actually know. “Aside from the… dead dog thing.” 

The man shakes his head, seeming a little let down. “Nah. No one’s stuck around long enough to get a good look.”

“Then how,” Sypha asks; the man looks to her attentively, the only one of them that most of the market vendors are familiar with, “do they know that it’s a Belmont?”

“Oh, you know,” the man waves a hand, dismissive. “They stamp that crest on everything, don’t they? Just between you and me,” he says, dropping his voice, “I’m kind of disappointed. I was kind of hoping they had really come back, alive and well—take care of this monster problem we’ve got, anyway.”

“And then what?” Trevor asks, maybe a little too intense. “After the monsters are gone.”

He’s expecting cold practicality. He’s expecting _well, then, we just burn them out again, worked great last time._

He’s not expecting the man to shrug, unconcerned, uninvested. “I imagine they’d probably want to rebuild, seeing as how there’s nothing up there now that don’t let the rain in. Except for that bloody great castle, yeah? Isn’t _that_ a thing.”

“It is,” Adrian agrees, coldly.

* *

The thing is, Trevor insists, people talk far more freely when they're trying to convince a reluctant customer. The market is the first place he goes in any settlement he’s just arrived in, and not just because he’s usually starving by the time he rolls in.

 _I’ve been there a lot_ , Sypha had protested, unconvinced. _It seems more like gossip than anything useful._

But everything Trevor had heard in Greşit had been gossip too, some of the worst, and he’d still managed to piece together what had been going on with the Speakers. _Gossip saved your peoples’ lives._

* *

“Recent gossip? Oh, Miss Sypha, you didn’t strike me as the type.”

Sypha’s cheeks go a little pink as Trevor watches, but she soldiers on. “When the mood hits, I suppose.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this much. They say Maila Nicu went up to the haunted castle to find out what happened to her poor old father, and the ghost that lives up there ate half her soul! She came back with her hair gone all white, saying the ghost got her father, too!”

“Oh, she did not,” chimes in a second woman. They’re working the fruit stall together, don’t look related but argue like sisters, or like a married couple. “I saw her yesterday,” she says, arranging a plate of caramel-dipped apples; the sunset brings out peoples’ sweet tooth, apparently. “She was _fine_ , not a white hair in sight.”

“You spoilsport,” the first woman says, acidic. “The point of juicy gossip ain’t the _truth.”_

“And yet,” Adrian says, looming over Sypha’s shoulder. “The truth is what we’re after.”

The second woman narrows her eyes, taking a good, long look at Adrian before answering, slowly and metered out. “...she’s fine. Said her old man got killed by some monsters, which is what we all expected. Castle was empty, apparently.”

“My version’s better,” the first woman snipes, stacking pears and plums carefully.

* *

So, here they are. They’ve spent the day, observing, listening. Adrian bought a roll of fine linen the same blue as Sypha’s Speaker robes but a dozen times richer; Sypha did _not_ buy a chicken, since they’d been planning to stay until evening and that would have gotten obnoxious fast. 

Trevor has mostly been wandering, keeping his eyes and face down. The cloak he’s thrown on covers up his weapons and anything recognizable in his clothes; it has a hood, in case he needs to mask the scar or his face in shadow, but it turns out it only makes him look more shady, so he's left it down.

He’d lost Sypha and Adrian somewhere between the fruit stall and the old lady selling papanași, who had had little to say on the topic of the Mysterious Belmonts aside from the fact that their children always used to frequent her stand, and that she misses the dears, in that way that old women often miss a cat that died thirty years ago. Time compresses near the end of life, they say. And Trevor remembers her, actually, remembers the hot dough and the sweet cheese and the sticky jam; he always got his last, whenever they came here, because his elder siblings pushed and jostled him out of the way until he was out at the periphery of their little knot. Sometimes, she put an extra spoon of jam on his, to make up for it. Small kindnesses.

He buys one, eats it while he’s walking, allows himself a few minutes for memory to be a pleasant and safe place. 

This hasn’t been as bad as he’d expected, honestly. It’s clearly _not_ the whole town on mad old Nicu’s side; the population has turned over a lot, and there are more new faces than old. Those that he does recognize are fifteen years older, verging on decrepit, neither living well nor treated well by time, and sometimes, revenge is something that happens without your intervention.

Notably absent are representatives of the church. The night market he expects them to avoid, being too hedonistic for men of the cloth—like God gives a damn if people eat a piece of pie and drink a little cider to warm their bones against the autumn evening—but they’d been missing during the day, too. Which is just as well; if Trevor had caught sight of the one who’d incited the whole mob, or either of the two that had caught him in the brush, hauling him out to watch his entire world end before his eyes with the kind of glee that only evil men should feel—well, it might just have ruined their little outing.

Hmm. Cider. That sounds like a plan. He’ll get cider _first_ , then catch up with Sypha and Adrian. So that they can’t talk him out of _getting_ the cider.

He’s brilliant.

* *

“You’re new,” the man at the drinks stall says when Trevor rolls up, voice all suspicion and almost comical mistrust.

“Yeah,” Trevor says; he’d claim to just be passing through, but he’s learned that unnecessary lies pretty much always come back to bite him in the ass. “Is that a problem?”

The man narrows his eyes, just two dark slivers in all the sharp, contrasty light. Then Sypha appears at Trevor’s elbow, nibbling on what looks and smells like a wine-soaked, baked pear wrapped in _bacon_ , of all things and, actually, holy shit, that sounds amazing. The kind of amazing you’d never expect but your soul just _knows_ it when you see it. Smell it. Whatever.

“Where did you _get that?”_ he asks, voice lowered, thoroughly distracted. The man at the stall is, at least for now, forgotten. Good Christ, his mouth is actually _watering_. How long ago was bloody lunch?

But the man hasn’t forgotten _him,_ and the suspicion melts away into surprise. “Oh,” he says, with a hesitant attempt at a smile that isn’t quite sure if it wants to mean itself. “You’re with the good miss, here.”

“My friend, yes.” Sypha crunches a bit of bacon, and she’s being a deliberate tease about it, Trevor would swear it under pain of death. She’s the fucking worst. Unless she decides to share, in which case she is, in fact, the _best._ “He helps with the animals.”

Ah, right. The story she’s been giving people is that they have a small farm just past the mountain ridge to the north. Treacherous enough terrain to justify the fact that she visits so rarely, and to keep curious townfolk from going looking for it. It’s one of those good cover stories: simple, straightforward, hard to get it tangled up in itself.

“Yeah,” Trevor says, tensing in case they're called out on it. “Good with the pigs, me.”

An elbow in his ribs. “Sheep.”

“ _Sheep._ Right.” So much for _hard to fuck it up_ , but then, he’s always aimed high in that regard. He plasters on an affable grin. "Sorry, that bacon’s _really_ distracting. Maybe we _should_ get a pig."

Sypha rolls her eyes, flashes a coin. “My friend here is clearly delirious from the cold, Palta. Be a good man and draw him a cider?”

Palta laughs for real now—their banter has sold him—and turns to pull down a hammered metal mug, fills it from the bubbling cauldron next to him, and okay, even if she doesn’t share her syrupy bacony treat Sypha is firmly back in _the best_ territory.

And as it turns out, she’s done both. As they turn to wind their way back into the crowd, she slips a greasy parchment-wrapped lump into his hand, and lo, it’s a baconpear of his own. Between his first bite of that and his first sip of the cider, it’s like every part of him from his tongue to his stomach is singing, his heart most wildly of all, and he is so lucky and for just a second nothing hurts and god, _he loves her so much._

…and he only gets a hint that he’s said that last bit out loud when he keeps walking, licking pear juice from his fingers, and she doesn’t.

Oh, shit.

And it’s not that it’s not true, or that he wasn’t going to say it eventually, but… you don’t just blurt that kind of thing out, right? Normal people don’t just blurt that out, especially not around a fucking mouthful of bacon and booze. Is this bad? Bad timing, bad circumstances, something she didn’t want to hear at all? Has his ridiculous awkwardness doomed this thing?

When he turns back, though, she’s got an odd sort of smile on her face, kind of wistful and disbelieving and a little tweaked at one corner—but it’s not a _bad_ smile. It’s just another face that she makes sometimes, when something unexpected but still welcome catches her off guard.

“That’s… good to know,” she says, fighting down an obvious urge to laugh.

He ducks his head, feels the sheepish grin spread against his best efforts. “Yeah?”

“Yes. It’s important to know who I can depend on to leap in front of an attacking bear for me.”

Trevor grins into the mug, lets the steam warm his face. “I thought _I_ was the pet bear.”

“That was before you started washing regularly! Now you are just…Trevor.” She loops her arm through his, and it’s such a quiet, deliberate thing that it almost feels unreal. “One of my best friends, who I also love dearly.”

“And fuck sometimes,” he whispers sideways, leaning in close—because he is incapable of sincerely feeling the truth of her words, and because he has spent fifteen years convincing himself he is unlovable and he is not going to deconstruct that here and now. Not in among the colored lanterns and drunken peasants, with grease and juice dripping from his fingers and his heart in knots. So he jumps to making a shitty joke. Because that’s what he does.

And she does laugh, at least, bright and bold. “What good are friends, otherwise?”

“God, Speakers are weird,” Trevor grumbles, because he knows just how much ‘friends’ get up to in Speaker camps. They’re a disinhibited bunch, when it comes down to it, but he supposes anyone would be without the yoke of the church dragging them down into boring asceticism.

That elbow linked through his jabs him in the ribs again, nearly makes him drop the pear.

“I’m joking,” Sypha says, low, warm. “I have valued our friendship, for precisely what it was, since the day we—well, perhaps not the day we met. But not long after.” She pauses; they take a few more mindless steps. Out here on the outskirts of the market, the trees are denser, and are turning a riotous red and gold above them. “We meet few enough people in the world that we can trust, that we can be honest with. You have been that since, well, _nearly_ the beginning.”

“Did that start before or after the treatise on how rude I was?”

“You _were_ rude. My opinion on that has not changed. But you are better than that now, and even that rudeness makes more sense to me now that I can see the entire picture of you.”

And he can’t explain why, but her words only make him feel more exposed, more vulnerable. Make him want to draw back inside the invisible shell he’s been carrying on his back for years, built up from layers of apathy and alcohol-sodden escape and fatalism on a framework of fire-blackened timbers.

Instead, he finishes off the pear, tosses the core, and slips his hand into hers—just as sticky as his, so it’s no foul. He hopes.

“You’re not entirely wrong,” she says after a moment, with the weightiness of having given it a few solid minutes’ thought. “That this is at least a little bit a Speaker thing. We are very… open, and close, with some of those we consider friends. At least until we marry.”

 _That’s_ an understatement and a half, and a hell of a euphemism to boot. ‘Close’. “I _know_ ,” Trevor moans.

“There is a different name for it, though—it doesn’t translate. _Heart mates_ would be the closest. Those people you may not choose to ultimately live and raise a family with, but whose hearts and bodies you still know better than your own, who will always be a part of your life.”

“I know,” Trevor repeats, with more fondness this time. Then, something occurs to him. “That one man in your camp—Ard? Arn? Was he…”

“Mm,” Sypha says, neither confirming nor denying.

“Well, that explains why he was so hot on having me save you,” he says, teasing, and she laughs.

“You really think that is the only reason someone would care for my safety?” she asks, light. “Arn has always been a good friend.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Truly. A wonderful, kind, _generous, giving_ friend.”

“Oh, God,” Trevor says, rolling his eyes skyward. “Are we going to have to share you when your people visi—wait.” Something _else_ has just occurred to him, and he’s not sure he likes it. “Is that what we are?” he asks, trying hard to sound casual. He isn’t even sure what he wants more—commitment of the sort he’s used to thinking about, or a friend he’ll never have to stop loving, but can never completely have—but either way, it feels like he’s just set his heart on a stone before her, to bring a hammer down on as she pleases.

“No,” she says, without hesitation, without any sense of annoyance that he might have thought otherwise. Are his insecurities really that transparent? “The two of you—unconventional as it is, I very much do want to spend my life with you. If you’ll have me. I know I’m not precisely nobility.” 

Trevor allows himself one breath in quiet relief, then laughs, a little disbelieving. “Do you seriously think that matters? Sypha, you can set people’s heads on fire with your _mind_.” Thinking back, she pretty much had him that night in Greşit, weaving fire around him like a guardian wall, declaring _I fight for myself_ like an unalterable truth. “All noblewomen can do is...I don’t know. Needlepoint. Play the harp. My family _used_ to care about marrying nobility, hundreds of years ago, but by the time I was growing up that was done with. My mother was a fletcher’s daughter, she made the _best_ arrows and bolts. Was a dead-eye shot with them, too.” 

Sypha just looks searchingly at him for a moment. She’s looking for the grief, he realizes, and he wonders to himself where exactly it’s gone. He can still feel the shape of it, but it’s like talking about her has sharpened the good memories, defanged the bad ones that usually cling to him. Interesting, really.

“It’s okay,” he says, assuring.

A nod, a pause, then: “So, how exactly do you know all of this? About Speakers, I mean. It is not common knowledge. _”_

“Spent some time with a group of you when I was, I don’t know, fifteen or so? Just had a close call with some bastards from the church, so I needed somewhere to lie low. Couple of kids there the same age— _very_ enlightening for a sheltered, antisocial teenager.” And all of this is, realistically, the answer to Adrian’s wonderings from the other day, but it’s not Trevor’s to talk about—when she wants to explain to him that she comes from a culture that embraces love and everything that goes with it, without any of the shame and moralizing and exclusivity the church has beaten into it everywhere else, she will.

“Trevor Be—” she starts, teasing, then cuts herself off, glancing around to see if anyone caught her near-slip. As far as Trevor can see, the crowd’s milling continues uninterrupted. She lowers her voice, feigning scandalized. “…did you get dragged into a compromising situation by the naughty Speakers?”

“Me?” Trevor shakes his head. “Nah. I mean, damned if didn’t see a lot, but I didn’t really know anyone, so there wasn’t much appeal.”

And she just hums curiously at that, which makes him feel inexplicably self-conscious, but whatever. He’d been _fifteen,_ for God’s sake; he hadn’t yet gotten to the random one-night-stand stage of his life, in which the crawling, abandonment-fueled need for human contact had overridden his natural distrust of, basically, everyone. Doesn’t make him weird or anything, it makes him _smart_ , and it’s not like that had been a _good_ time in his life.

He finds what he has now a lot more satisfying: these strong, gorgeous, brilliant people who still somehow care about him against all reasonable judgment, who he knows and trusts and actually _wants_ in ways he’s never wanted anyone, before. Wants to touch and be touched, wants to feel their skin grow warm under his hands and their bodies go taut and shaking against his, wants to sink into them and be sunken into—wants to drive Sypha to forget all of her words and wants to shatter all of Adrian’s cool composure, not just once as a novelty or an experiment but over and over again.

…he also wants to know exactly why he figured indulging this line of thought was at all a good idea, at this exact time and place. It’s a good thing he wore this travel cloak, honestly; fucking Adrian had wanted him to—

Speaking of.

“Where’d—” Hm. _Adrian_ only in private, but throwing _Alucard_ around in this particular setting seems like a bad plan, too. “—our friend end up?”

She squeezes his hand. “Over in the center of the square, arguing with a rather overwhelmed-looking young man about the price of fruit tarts.”

Trevor would facepalm if his mug-free hand wasn’t completely sticky. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. He literally has _all the money_.”

“That’s the point, I think. He’s trying to convince the baker to charge more; he says that what they’re charging now is an injustice considering the quality of the product.” Sypha pauses, thoughtful. “It’s _possible_ the tarts may have had some brandy in them. Why?” she asks, lightly. “Are you planning to dramatically confess your love to him, too?”

He’s already partway through laughing at the question, a habitual response—when he stops in his tracks, dropping his eyes to the ground, startled into silence by the realization that _she’s being serious_. And he can kind of imagine how that would go, for better or worse, though the brandy might alter the equation.

“Really?” she asks, reading his silence as agreement, and she sounds _gleeful_.

“No, I…” Trevor looks up to meet her eyes. “I wasn’t _planning_ on it. Tonight, I mean.” But then, he hadn’t been planning to blurt it out to Sypha tonight, either. Maybe it’s not really the kind of thing you’re supposed to plan. “Besides, I’m pretty sure he already knows.”

“You think that he can taste it,” she says, matter-of-fact.

“I _know_ he can, the smug fuck.”

“Do you think he still might like to _hear_ it?”

Probably, yeah. Probably. It’s one of those questions with an obvious answer, and the only point is to get him to admit it. Doesn’t mean he has to make it easy for her. He grumbles indistinctly, some nonsense he doesn’t mean about stupid vampires and their stupid feelings.

Sypha rolls her eyes, shakes her head, smile not entirely falling away. “One of these days, Trevor, you will regret—”

This would be the moment, of course, that the market square explodes.

* *

Really, it would be more accurate to say: a plume of fire spits down out of the black sky, engulfing the vendor stalls closest to the center of the square in a cloud of violently expanding flame, the shockwave of which rips up the stone of nearby buildings and digs trenches in the hard dirt of the ground like the spokes of a giant wagon wheel. So, almost an explosion, but technically not quite.

“Oh, _shit,_ ” Trevor breathes, not even remotely interested in the technicalities. The sound of it is swallowed up by the sudden uproar, the screams and collapsing stands and general chaos; he can feel his mouth move, but cannot hear his own voice. Fuck. FUCK. That’s—that’s where—

_One of these days—_

Sypha’s tugging on his sleeve, pulling him toward the nearby buildings, but oh, fucking fuck, that’s where she said Adrian was, possibly tipsy and most definitely getting distracted by stupid arguments like an _idiot,_ except he had to have seen whatever this was coming, right? He can’t have been that oblivious.

_—you will regret—_

And it would be a very dramatic story, later, if Adrian had in fact been caught in the explosion, had seemed lost for a few terrifying moments, had required rescuing—if, in the shocky aftermath, Trevor _had_ finally gotten around the rocks in his head enough to get the words out. But in reality, dhampir just aren’t that fragile, and one epic rescue is probably the most Trevor can expect the randomness of fate to set up for him. And it’s not like he actually needs the fucking stress of all of that, _Jesus._

So it’s relief beyond measure when he holds his hand up against his eyes, shielding them from the glare of the inferno, and sees that lanky, graceful figure beating hasty tracks up the road towards them. He looks like he came straight out of the fire; there’s still a lick of flame on the trailing edge of the dusty old coat he’d settled on as a disguise. All around them, people are scattering, fleeing.

Then another figure emerges out of the flames—larger, winged, entirely more _wrong_. Black, in that endless way the space between stars is black, eating up the light from the fire and the lanterns and the nearly full moon. It lumbers and leaps, too graceful for its size, hot on Adrian’s arse like it knows _exactly_ who the real threats are here, exactly who to take out first.

Night creatures. Damn it all to hell. Ha, literally. Except, no, this isn’t funny, because—

“ _How many?_ ” Trevor shouts, reaching out as soon as Adrian’s in range to snag him by the arm and pull him along as they all jink sideways into an open doorway. The whip’s already in his other hand, the mug dropped and forgotten, and he keeps one foot out in the open, dropping hard into a low stance, cracking the whip without thinking. He lets pure intent and instinct guide his hand and pull the line of it into a graceful, precise arc, skimming past obstacles, avoiding humans. The demon does what demons do, under the touch of consecrated leather: it swells and it burns and it blows apart, like the world has suddenly decided to no longer tolerate its existence.

“I counted four, in the square,” Adrian snarls, beating at the burning bit of his coat with his hand once they’re safely under cover. He’s not even a little bit out of breath. Bastard. “Three of these common ones, one quite a bit larger, but flightless.”

“Three, now. I like our odds,” Trevor says, ducking back behind cover. Then he glances down at Adrian’s hip, scowls. “Where the hell’s your sword?”

“It was knocked away from me,” he says, and yeah, he’s holding his sword hand a little oddly; there’s an ugly, ragged gash across his palm and the base of his thumb that’s knitting itself together as they speak. One of the demons must have gotten _damn lucky._ “I don’t want to call it to me with so many bystanders in between—when we get back in closer, I should be able to retrieve it.”

 _And who says we’re going in closer,_ asks Trevor’s years of trained-in apathy, the exhausted, drunken curmudgeon in his head. He doesn’t even justify it by giving it voice. “All right,” he says, pulling his own sword free, flipping the grip in his hand and offering it pommel-first in Adrian’s general direction. “Until then.”

Adrian hesitates; there’s a shuffle of movement out of the corner of Trevor’s eye, hands slipping into gloves, and oh, _right_. The sword’s blessed, too. But when Adrian finally takes it he does it with surety and his hand doesn’t catch _fire_ or anything, so apparently glove leather is good enough. 

He winds the whip back up, resettles the grip in his hand, the satisfying hum of demon-killing energy warm and charged against his skin, as always. Reassuring.

“All right,” he says, leaning out around the doorway to get a look at the square; there’s Adrian’s larger demon, all right, coming out of the fire all spines and spikes and too many eyes and too many _bones_ , from the way it’s moving. “Sypha, you think you can pull that ice wall trick again, separate them from the townsfolk? Especially the big guy, there.”

“I could,” she says. “But…”

But it would blow their cover with these people, forever. It would also, possibly, save lives. Trevor’s torn, grits his teeth looking out over the chaos.

It… huh. It isn’t actually that chaotic. The people are mostly getting clear, fleeing into their homes, which actually look decently reinforced. They're doing it in a downright orderly fashion, for being under attack by horrific freaks of nature—they must be used to this. The demons are, oddly, doing more property damage than they are directed killing; it’s like they’re just lashing out, animals with no real driving motivation behind their actions.

Okay. No ice wall. “I’m going after big bad, here,” Trevor finds himself saying. “I should be able to keep him occupied. Alucard, get past us and back to the square where the other two are. Take them out.”

Adrian nods sharply, no eyes for anything but the creature in the street. He settles the sword in his grip, looking for the balance point—and if the ghost of Leon Belmont has any problem with the son of Dracula using his old weapon, he’s not making his concerns known.

“Sypha,” Trevor says, turning to her. “Give us whatever cover you can, with ice or anything you think will work. But stay out of sight, and don’t cast _anything_ they can track back to you. Last thing we need is any more idiotic witchcraft allegations.”

Her expression hardens. “I will cast whatever I _need to_ , to protect the two of you.”

God, of course she will. This is why he _actually_ loves her, treats and favors be damned. “Just don’t get caught,” he says, leaning in to press an urgent kiss beneath her ear.

Then he turns to Adrian, pulls him down for the same lightning-quick farewell, skin shockingly cold against his lips after the heat of the cider—and then he’s out of the protective doorway, feet beating the dirt and awareness narrowing down to the grotesque, impossible beast looming closer by the second. It’s tremendous, almost as big as the minotaur was. Its entire face is adorned with spines, limbs lined with them, bristling and shaking and moving as if they have their own minds.

It doesn't matter. If it's alive, he can kill it.

Trevor slides to a stop just to the beast's left, sends the whip flying with all the momentum he’d so suddenly arrested. He can feel the fluidity of it, the _rightness,_ and at first, it feels like any other fight—a welcome release from the care he’s forced to take when sparring. He doesn’t have to pull his punches now, which feels _great,_ and that first strike draws its attention hard; Trevor can see the shifting red glow out of the corner of his eye that shows that Adrian’s made it past on the other side.

Okay. Good. Plan working as intended. Go them.

But the demon has an uncanny sense of where his attacks are coming from and keeps shifting its bristling spines to keep them between it and Trevor like a, hell, what are they called? Porpencine? Whatever, he’s only ever seen one of the freakish things, down in the south of the continent, but once had been enough. Fighting this guy is like a dog tangling with one of those spiny bastards—anything he tries to launch at it just gets caught up in the forest of points—the tips of the spines crisp and wither wherever the whip touches them, but it just can’t get _through._ Even the ice spikes that Sypha’s throwing at him are just brittle-fracturing to pieces when they try to burrow through. It’s maddening.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he grumbles, as he pulls the whip back from another useless strike—if he’s not careful he’s going to shred the leather. The Morning Star would have been so much better for this, could have broken through the spines like they were made of paper, but he doesn’t _have_ it so there’s no point thinking about it.

So: fine, whip’s not much use here, and he—wait, spiny arm incoming, a sweeping backhand that he ducks under cleanly, a deadly wind whipping across his back as he rolls—and he gave his fucking sword away, of course. Because he’s an idiot. A sentimental idiot, even, which is even worse. That leaves the knives, but they’re not consecrated, they’re not even silver or salted, which—okay, if they get through this, he’s going to have to swallow his pride and find a priest that he doesn’t want to murder on sight and _do_ something about—

Too much thinking, not enough moving. The thing swings at him with another wild swipe, dropping its massive foot to the ground inches from where Trevor stands, in an attempt to box him in, give him nowhere to dodge.

In that instant, a frozen moment between life and death, Trevor processes the scene in front of him and realizes two things.

One, unless the demon decides to sit straight down on its arse, it can’t block the space between its own legs as an escape route.

Two, the back of its leg isn’t armored with spikes.

Trevor pulls his boot knife, dodges _toward_ the foot, slipping into the space underneath the creature and slashing out with the blade to neatly sever the tough, fibrous tendon stringing its heel to the rest of its leg. It's not a convenient artery like he'd been able to get at with the minotaur, but it should be enough to hobble the bastard.

The movement also gets him clear of the swipe, but what it doesn't do is stop the thing's tail—since when does it have a fucking _tail_ how did he miss that—from lashing forward between its legs, nailing him sidelong, spines tearing through cloth and leather and skin all up and down his right side. It hurts like a hundred knives, like a thousand nails, and it tosses him back out in front again, which is not where he wants to be. But then the beast lets out a very satisfying shriek, listing off to one side as the leg collapses under him, muscles quivering violently. 

And oh, it _is_ satisfying. But it’s not enough. The thing is huge and enraged and in pain and it’s just collapsed the one route Trevor could see to get to its unprotected side, and he just does not have the tools he needs for the job. He takes a few steps backward, trying to get a little space to come up with a strategy, spitting out the blood in his mouth and reaching with a hand wrapped in cloak to clear the mess from his eyes. He can’t let himself think about the fact that his arm and leg and that whole side of his body might very well be ripped to shreds, that maybe the only reason they aren’t hurting yet is because adrenaline is a hell of a thing.

The creature stretches out its neck toward him, grotesque and impossible—roars into his face, and his strategic retreat turns into a desperate backward scramble. The toothy maw is chasing after him closely enough that he can smell the death and misery on its breath, that he can count the teeth and just about see his reflection in the saliva-shine of its black tongue, and he just can’t move backward quickly enough. 

Then he feels stone against his back, the building’s outer wall cool in the evening air, and suddenly there’s no more _back_ to be had. He goes cold, too. Any second, the jaws are going to snap shut around him, so the thing can swallow him whole or maybe rip him in half down the middle, enjoy him in _bite-sized pieces_. He swings out with the knife and gets the whip ready, because he's never seen anything that armors the inside of its mouth—and because if he’s going down, it’s going to be with weapons up and outward and ripping this thing up as much as he can. Until he can’t anymore.

God, this really isn’t how he wanted to go out—all to save a bunch of people he _hates_ , and in full view of the people he _loves_. He’s going to become their latest trauma, the newest thing for them to wake screaming in the night over, and he can’t think of anything worse he could do to them.

And he’s wracking his brain for _anything_ , any last-ditch crazy bullshit he can try, because that’s what he _does_ —maybe he can use the whip to scale the wall, but that would take too long, maybe he could climb the thing’s face, use the spines like ladder rungs—when the ground by the beast’s feet erupts in frozen spikes, the thicker, sturdier ice blasting through all its protective layers and skewering its feet and legs.

It rears back, away from Trevor, and it screams, and it _screams_.

 _Cut that a little fine, Sypha,_ he thinks, and he thinks: _Thank you, thank you._ He’s considering whether he can slide under the thing still, now that it’s pinned to the spot, get to its unprotected back, but it’s still standing there cockeyed with one leg buckled under it and the space just isn’t big enough like that. 

He’s just starting to accept that he’s going to have to get _around_ it somehow, when a pair of blades erupt from the demon's neck, two shining red spikes in amongst all the black.

Now the demon _really_ loses it, though the screaming has turned more to a gurgle; still, it’s not enough damage to put it down for good, and before the blades’ wielder can get the leverage they need to slice the thing’s head off, it rears up and swings its entire torso wildly, like a dog shaking off fleas. On one particularly violent swing, the swords vanish from its neck and a figure in a long coat and useless fucking prissy long hair goes flying into the nearby buildings, hitting them at force.

For just a second, the beast is so furious, so intent on ridding itself of its assailants, that it is ignoring pain and ignoring what its own biology should be capable of. It is standing tall, spitting blood as it attempts to roar its agony and rage into the night.

For just a second, the opening is there.

It’s there, and Trevor takes it. He gets a running start, drops and slides painfully over the rough packed dirt of the road, between the beast’s legs and out to the other side. Before it can gather the strength it needs to break free of the ice impaling its feet, Trevor twists around and sends the whistling end of the whip, straight and true, into the base of its spine.

The bubbling, blistering wave of consecration ripples through its skin, runs out to the end of every spike, lights up every wrong-moving bone the thing has, before it blows apart like it was never there.

Cinders and bits of demonflesh float down on the breeze. Trevor closes his eyes, breathes. Pushes to his feet.

“You forgot your own advice,” Adrian calls, picking his way out of the rubble of the building he’d been thrown into. He’s still carrying both swords, all coated in gore, and he sounds sardonic, throwing Trevor’s words back at him even as he offers the sword back. _We don’t do this shit alone_. Then his eyes settle on Trevor properly, and they go wide, worried.

“Looks worse than it is,” Trevor says, preemptively, taking the sword from him. “It’s all superficial,” he says, because it feels that way at the moment and they still have _shit to do._

“…Trevor,” Adrian says, careful. “You’re bleeding a _lot_.”

“No shit.” Trevor swipes at his face again, to clear his vision. “Focus here. Let’s go make two more dead demons, and _then_ maybe you can have a snack.”

Adrian looks distinctly appalled, because that wasn’t what he _meant_ , and of course it wasn’t, but then there’s a scream from the burning square and damn it—he thought the townfolk knew to go to fucking ground. He was _trusting_ them to handle themselves so that he could handle _this._

Trevor gathers his whip back up, hurriedly stashes the knife and the sword where they belong. Glances at Adrian again, because all joking aside, he _is_ the vampire equivalent of wrapped in bacon, and he’d already seen how that tended to go down. “Seriously, I know I’m a mess. Can you keep it together?”

Now Adrian just looks _insulted._ Good. Insulted is better than appalled. “ _Of course_ I can. I’m not an _animal._ ”

That’s good enough for Trevor; he turns back toward where all the civilians have fled to. “Get water!” he shouts, he can feel his voice wavering, breaking. “More than you think you’ll need, these fires won’t go out easily.” He’s seen ice creeping in, impinging on the fire and penning it in from this side of the square, but there’s only so much Sypha can do from cover.

They scatter, hopefully doing as he said. They might just be running away from him; he must look _terrible._

“All right,” Trevor says, flexing his fingers on the whip’s handle, the other hand settling on Adrian’s wrist with a squeeze. “Let’s go.”

* *

The remaining two night creatures—both the more bog-standard variety, wings and firebreath and glowing red eyes—dispatch easily enough, especially now that Adrian’s got his own sword back in hand, freeing Trevor up to fight with more versatility. One of them gets frighteningly close to a mother and child cowering behind a food stall, slashing the stall itself aside and making ready to do the same to the two hiding there, before Trevor manages to get close behind it and behead it; he will try to forget, in the coming days, that the child looked more afraid of _him_ , standing there in the bloody aftermath, than she did of the demon. 

Adrian takes out the last of them with his blue-blazing sword and his usual effortless grace; it’s almost anticlimactic. Water arrives soon after, buckets and buckets of it, and when it hits the fire it steams and _freezes_ there. He thinks Sypha must have relocated to a rooftop, gotten a better vantage, because the ring of ice grows until the entire fire is encircled, contained.

Trevor gives up all pretense of command at this point, becomes just another link in the chain of water buckets between the well pump and the blazing town center. He spots Sypha doing the same, now that she’s done what she can to halt its spread. It’s the perfect moment for all three of them to fade into the crowd, in preparation for slipping off unnoticed.

Except for the bit where his entire right side is painted red, his clothes are shredded, and he’s very clearly one of the Mysterious Strangers that took down the demons in their midst. And he’s honestly forgotten how bad it is, has passed along about twenty buckets down the line, when there’s a momentary break in the flow and the man next to him takes the opportunity to grasp him by his unbloodied shoulder.

Trevor stiffens, instinctually twisting away from the contact.

“Whoa, careful,” the man says, hand up in the air as if in supplication. “You’re really tore up, friend.”

 _Friend_. These people aren’t his fucking friends. They’re his family’s killers, and he already bled for them tonight, why the hell is he still here, still _helping_ them?

Because it’s what he’s supposed to do?

Because they need the town and its market, for supplies, for information?

Because children live here too, who weren’t even imagined yet when their parents took his life away from him?

Shit.

“I’m fine,” Trevor hisses.

“I just don’t… you’re bleeding into the water.”

Trevor looks down at the bucket in his hand; his fingers are running with blood, and the water’s surface is blooming with red splotches, like the petals of poppies. 

“Puts out the fire just as well,” he says, after probably too long a moment. “What’s the problem?”

And of course, because life hates him, this is the moment his brain decides to lose track of his feet. He goes into a woozy, lightheaded spin; somewhere distant, there’s a splash of water, a crack of wood hitting cobblestone.

“You’ve done enough, you need to sit this one out,” the man says, gripping him by the shoulder again, and he sounds so _kind_ that it hurts.

 _Fuck_ , Trevor thinks, _maybe it’s not so superficial after all._ His head is still spinning, vision tunneling, and his entire side is throbbing. God damn is he going to have some impressive new scars soon. Hopefully.

“I’ll get him somewhere comfortable,” a voice says from the side. It sounds odd and echoey, in this strangely spinny place. He can’t pin it down, and he’s about to protest when an unearthly cool hand wraps around his upper arm and his subconscious says _relax_ , says _safe_.

“…fine,” he spits, pretending not to know Adrian, pretending he’s just accepting a stranger’s courtesy as the dhampir steers him out of the water line and toward the less burnt part of the square.

* *

Sypha doesn’t cry over him, because he’s not dead or dying or even close, and she’s too strong to cry for anything less. He thinks. She’s stronger than he is, anyway.

She still gazes across at him with a _look_ on her face composed almost entirely of heartbreak, and Adrian’s voice sounds like a hollowed-out echo coming up from dark, endless places. They hunch over him in the shadowy entrance of a wrecked tailor’s, cleaning and bandaging him, trying to mend something that’s been broken for a very long time.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoa look at that, some shit HAPPENED. action and everything! don't worry about Treffy, the cuts actually ARE pretty superficial, there's just a lot of them. Like rug burn, but if the rug was made of demon spikes.
> 
> also: I love the Speakers so freaking much.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for medicinal use of a drug that is no longer, in 2019, considered medicine.
> 
> ie trevor spends the whole first section high off his ass, and it's adrian's fault.

*

Trevor wakes up in less pain than he expected. He also, however, wakes up much stiffer than he expected, and quite a bit less _bleeding on everything._ Must be the next day, then.

He cracks his eyes open and reaches up with his good hand, gingerly touches the side of his face. It’s covered in bandages, and when he presses down—okay, _ow_. And it’s not just his face. Under the blanket, he can tell he’s nearly naked, bandages pulling and pinching all up and down his side.

God, he really fucked himself up last night.

And yet, again: not much pain. Also, oddly, his memory of exactly _how_ he fucked himself up is… there, but hazy. He’d been fighting, he’s sure, some huge awful thing. But he can’t quite work out how it had ended. Clearly he’d made it back to the castle somehow. Sypha and Adrian had been there, and—

Oh. Oh, _shit_. Are they all right? If _he’s_ this ripped up… 

No. He remembers staggering down the road like a drunkard slung between them, the moon dizzyingly bright, their faces washed out and pinched and pale. They were fine.

He still looks to either side, careful to not pull on the bandages. Sypha’s on his right, Adrian on his left, probably because Adrian has a tendency to be a lot more clingy in his sleep and that’s something best kept away from the injured. Despite the fact that, again, he doesn’t actually hurt that much.

Important things sorted, Trevor closes his eyes, tries to rest. Deprived of a visual context, the entire world spins out from under him, a seasick-dizzy fog that he could easily let fold him up in it and suck him down into the dark. It’s tempting. It’s—

Wait. Foggy, somersaulting brain; right side shredded like a side of beef but just barely, faintly aching. His eyes fly open again.

“You shit,” he whispers at Adrian’s sleeping face. His voice sounds like the croak of a half-dead crow; his mouth tastes like a completely dead crow. “You gave me something, didn’t you?”

No response. Not even an out of place eyelid flutter.

He knows full well that he’s probably high off his arse right now and, compounded by the blood loss, it’s making him painfully sentimental. He still can’t help but notice how different Adrian looks, asleep like this, face devoid of tension and irritation and sadness. He tries to conjure the face he remembers facing off against in the vault that night, all snarling fanginess and cornered-wolf rage. Try as he might, he can’t get that image to overlay on this one.

He reaches across with his bandaged hand, sets it lightly on the side of Adrian’s face. Still no reaction; the bastard is out cold. It feels like a strange in-between place, a moment outside of time where, honestly, nothing actually matters.

“Love you, you arsehole,” he croaks, barely audible. “Blurted it out to Sypha like an idiot last night. Only fair you hear it too.”

Time restarts, and the eyes open, because of course they do—and Trevor jumps a little, startled by the sheer _wrongness_. They apparently never got around to dispelling Sypha’s illusion, because where Trevor’s used to seeing something like firelight through a lens of honey and gold leaf, all that’s there now is a flat, dull blue-green. It’s like looking into a pool of water exactly half an inch deep, with nothing beneath the surface but weedy shadows.

“That’s very courteous of you,” Adrian says, and it should be sarcasm, _must_ be sarcasm. But it doesn’t sound like it.

Trevor rolls his eyes anyway. "You're still a bastard."

"But I'm the bastard you decided to fall for."

It's funny, how the things he says that end up mattering the most always stick in his head like this. "Back in Greşit?"

"Maybe, if I'm to believe what you've told me of Belmont courting practices," Adrian says, going off-script. He lets his eyes drift lazily half-closed, that ugly teal darkening into unnatural looking slits.

Trevor sighs. “Close your eyes.”

Confusion flits across Adrian’s face, but he complies. “Mind if I ask why?”

“…creeping me out,” Trevor croak-slurs, and it’s harder than he expected to make sentences happen. “S’wrong.”

Adrian chuckles, rolls toward Trevor—straddles his unbandaged leg and brings them to within inches of each other’s mouths, all without so much as cracking an eye open.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, low and syrupy, “and I hope it’s worth quite a bit—the sentiment is mutual.”

Trevor blinks slowly; thinking feels like swimming in mud. What had he just said, before that? “My eyes are creepy too? I thought you _liked_ —”

Adrian sighs, though the smile never leaves him. “The _other_ sentiment.”

Oh. Right. _That_ one. Okay, good to know, but—but that’s a _fucking copout_. Trevor had made the effort to actually say the damn words, and it’s not like it'd been easy, even _if_ he'd thought Adrian was asleep at the time, but—

Then Adrian is kissing him, swallowing down his protest until it trails off into a vaguely confused moan. He’s gentler than he usually is, not so forceful or intense, but the kiss is entangling, complicated, each shift of Adrian’s lips against his speaking a world of longing and relief and the grief of near-misses.

Trevor doesn’t remember much of last night, but he remembers this: the clear, prophetic image in his mind of Adrian and Sypha, alone together in this bed. It’s the kind of thing that haunts.

Adrian pulls away after a stretch. He sets their foreheads together, one hand cradling the base of Trevor’s skull.

"I'm glad I'm not a nightmare," Trevor offers, entirely out of context.

Adrian's brows pull together in confusion—then loosen up again as he seems to get it, heartbreak leaking into his expression one breath at a time. "As am I,” he says, and it’s the kind of moment where he should be gazing down at Trevor with all the love and lust in his heart—except that he still has his stupid eyes closed.

"You have been a nightmare as long as we've known you," Sypha yawns out, fingers creeping to touch him carefully through the bandages. "But you are worth it."

Adrian laughs, and after a second Trevor does too—not entirely sure, through the fog in his head, what they're laughing about.

“Why,” Sypha asks Adrian, all sleepy disorientation, “do you have your eyes closed?”

“At our hunter’s request,” Adrian replies, all cool composure. “Apparently, my looking more convincingly human is ‘creeping him out’.”

And that’s not really it—the problem is that he _doesn’t_ look more human like this, he looks _less_. Looks like something two days dead, like the way fish’s eyes look when they’ve been on the bank a few hours. Doesn’t look like himself, which on its own feels mildly obscene.

“Let me see,” Sypha says, before he can blurt any of that stupid bullshit out, and just for that alone, Trevor is grateful—he’s finding that he has many reasons, the more he gives his internal voice free reign to comment on it. She reaches to turn Adrian’s face toward her.

“Tch.” She shakes her head after only a second. “I agree. They don’t suit you.” She touches him on the temple; there’s a little spark, a little puff of light, and Trevor watches from the side as the false color drains away like someone’s pulled a stopper.

Then he turns back to Trevor, mouth opening around a tease that never takes voice—because his face falls, sadness much clearer in the gold as he takes in the sight, probably the first time he has without candlelight and shadow conspiring to hide the worst of it. In the full light of day… “…you’re a mess.”

“And you,” Trevor says, trying to get an accusatory finger in the air between them, because he’s finally remembered what he was upset about. “ _Gave_ me something.”

“Mm. Opium. For the pain.”

Trevor’s eyes widen slightly. “Really.”

“I know, I know,” Adrian grouses, moving back to his own side of the bed to sit there in an annoyed huff. “You’re a big, tough hunter and you can handle the pain. The problem was that we could not get you to _sleep_ —which means that we could not sleep, either.”

“So you drugged me up with _opium_.” He should be pissed. He finds himself grinning stupidly instead.

“It’s a perfectly good painkiller.”

“It’s also what people use to get high off their fucking arses in all those exotic faraway places.” A pause. His eyes wander to the ceiling, which doesn’t want to come into focus; he loses his grip on time for, probably, only a few seconds. “Damn. I finally get to try the stuff and I’m too out of it to enjoy it.”

Sypha cocks her head to the side, rests it on her hand. Smiles, all fond amusement. “I believe that you are out of it _because_ of the drug.”

Adrian laughs a little, reaches across to touch Sypha’s cheek, trace a finger down her jawline. “Astute as always, Ms. Belnades. Being ‘out of it’ is, in fact, the entire experience of opium.”

“Well,” Trevor says, after a spacey moment. “ _That’_ s shit. I feel like shit. Why does anyone do this for fun?”

Then they laugh at him, or with him, or something. But it doesn’t sting, doesn’t raise his defensive hackles. It just makes him feel warm, as they fold him up in their arms and tuck all his fears away.

* *

Which, he will realize in retrospect, was probably also the opium’s fault—damn Adrian to hell.

* *

Later, after Adrian has wandered off to try to get breakfast together for them and Sypha is perched on the edge of the bed, tying her sandals on, Trevor resurfaces. It feels simultaneously like it has been a handful of seconds and like it has been a _year_.

“Hey,” he says. It’s not eloquent, but way he figures, he should get a fucking medal just for trying.

“Hello,” Sypha says, turning to smile down at him, a little sadly. “Decided to give consciousness another try?”

“If at first you don’t succeed.” He blinks, tries to clear the fog. It’s less thick, now, but it’s still there. “…wish he hadn’t given me this shit.”

Sypha keeps looking at him, and now the sadness is more obvious. It makes him feel twelve again; he pushes away from the feeling as hard as he can. “You really weren’t doing well, Trevor. He grew weary of seeing you in so much pain. I did, too.”

Hm. “So it wasn’t just that I was keeping him awake.”

She frowns at him, a long, drawn out look of disappointment. “Of course it wasn’t.”

Yeah, of course. Trevor knows better, at this point—knows that Adrian may grouse and play at being cold and irritable but that he also has an empathetic streak a mile wide, even with people he _isn’t_ in love with. Doesn’t mean Trevor’s going to start letting him off the hook for _acting_ like he doesn’t give a shit.

“He left for a bit,” Sypha continues, a little hesitant. “Last night, after you settled down. Spent some time wandering around your family’s cemetery.”

“Because that’s not creepy and morbid.” Trevor rolls his eyes, immediately regrets it. “…didn’t think I was bad enough off to start sniffing around for an empty plot.”

Sypha shakes her head. “I think he was just being moody, honestly. But he seemed disturbed by how young many of your ancestors were, when they…”

“Yeah,” Trevor says. The ceiling is doing a dizzy spin as he tries to push himself up on his elbows. “Belmonts don’t really die old.”

A hand settles on his arm, not to halt the attempt but to provide support. Her tone is guarded. “We would very much like to change that.”

 _Funny, so would I_ , he thinks. He almost wants to laugh, overcome by a wave of humor as black and miserable as the castle basements. “…can’t change how the world works,” is what he settles on. “Always more horrible things creeping around in the night. Everyone eventually makes a mistake.”

A long pause, as she helps him settle more upright; the struggle isn’t with the injuries, which while extensive in surface area covered, don’t seem to be that deep or life threatening. The struggle is with the remnants of the fucking _eastern pleasure den drug_ that are still working their way out of his system.

“…I saw most of the fight,” Sypha says, finally. “I won’t blame your injuries on recklessness—it was a… strange creature, with defenses aimed directly at what few combat weaknesses you have.”

Trevor squints. “Which is weird, when you put it that way?”

Her face hardens; she ignores the question. “What I will hold you accountable for, is not following your own rules. You said we were to face challenges as a united front.”

“Thought I was being…” Oh, hell. The word isn’t there when he reaches for it, forcing him to actively rummage around. Something that means making what in retrospect would be an obviously stupid decision, for completely rational and smart reasons at the time… “…strategic?”

She cracks a smile, shakes her head. “I understand that. We’ve seen you win against much worse odds, and had it been any other monster, I don’t doubt you could have handled it alone.”

And normally he would take the opportunity to gloat a little; she compliments his fighting ability rarely enough that it’s a shame to miss the chance. But he can’t stop thinking about the monster, now, the way it had seemed almost tailored to give _him_ , specifically, a bad time of it. He frowns.

“Perhaps if I could have covered you more openly...” Sypha continues, thoughtful. “But I could not, and given both of these disadvantages, the two of you should have worked together.”

“We did, in the end.”

“Only because Adrian decided not to follow your instructions.”

Trevor laughs. “He went rogue on me, the bastard.”

“I’m very glad that he did.”

Trevor sighs, shifting against the headboard. The drug’s definitely wearing off; where before he’d had no awareness of—or inclination to care about—pain, he can now feel a distinct tingling starting to run up and down his side. And his leg. And his arm, and up the side of his face. If the damage is really that extensive, no wonder he’d been in agony.

Hopefully, it won’t get that bad again, after hours under wraps and away from the air. But if it does, he’s not saying a word. He’d rather hurt than be that dazed again, that useless and helpless.

Sypha touches his hand, then his face, feather-light over the dressings; she’s silhouetted by the light from the window like an angel come down to lay healing hands on him. Only fuck knows Heaven would never waste an angel on his excommunicated arse.

Then she leans down and kisses him, long and heavy and with a hungry swipe of tongue that sends a different tingle through him entirely, and yeah, no. Not an angel. But that’s fine with him; the feathery fucks are overrated anyway.

* *

Once the smell of crisping bacon is working its way through the castle, smoke and savory threaded through with sweet—and the haze has dissipated sufficiently that he knows which way is up and which is down—Trevor lets Sypha ease a dressing gown over his bandages and help him stumblingly downstairs. He catches a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror, and it’s about as ridiculous as he expected; he’s been on this end of Adrian’s wound care before, and if nothing else, he’s thorough as hell. With most of the bandages needing to be looped around to secure them, his entire torso is a swathed mess of the things, thin stripes of flesh peeking through here and there, bruising brown and yellow and ugly around the edges. They’d very kindly _not_ bandaged over his eye, leaving him a hole to see through on that side, but it looks bloodshot and haunted and deeply shadowed, against all the white of the cloth.

He looks like—well, he isn’t sure. There’s nothing in bestiary he knows of that looks quite like this, but he definitely looks distinctly inhuman, like the beleaguered wartime ghost of someone who’d died halfway under the swords of his enemies and halfway under the misdirected tools of a healer. Betrayed by every hand that’d touched him, unable to rest until he’s made whole.

Huh. That would make a pretty interesting ghost story, actually. Shame he’s shit at telling stories.

Breakfast, once he gets there, is a quiet thing, both of them keeping a careful eye on him to make sure he’s not going to throw up all over his bandages, which Adrian probably boiled or put some salve on to keep them clean, some nonsense Trevor’s never heard of but nevertheless trusts him on. They _do_ smell funny, now that he thinks about it.

“We’re going to have to address this,” he finally says, when he can’t look at any more fruit or bread or even bacon without feeling a little queasy. “We can’t just lie low anymore. They know, or else they _think_ they know, which is basically ten times as dangerous.”

Adrian sets his mug down, looks thoughtful, which means that he’s stalling. “...the purpose of that trip—”

“The purpose of that trip was fucked the moment those things attacked.” Trevor tries to lift his eyebrows meaningfully; the right one gets hung up in the bandages and hell, he never realized how much he moves his damn face around on a regular basis. “People aren’t going to forget that they saw a suspicious stranger with a whip—one that'd just been walking around asking everyone and their aunt about the Belmonts—taking out demons like it was his job. I couldn’t have been more obvious if I’d been wearing the crest.”

“Don’t forget that there was also unexplained magic flying around,” Sypha says, sighing. “They will probably blame that on you, too.”

And it almost sounds less like she's worried for the implications and more like she's annoyed at never getting proper credit for her work. Trevor grins. “If you really _want_ the blame—”

“I do not want to be accused of devilry, no,” she says, irritation showing through. “But I would happily live in a world where I could say, ‘I helped. I did this.’”

“Openly,” Trevor elaborates for her, setting the uninjured side of his face on his fist. “Without having to worry about what happens next.”

“Yes.”

“Sypha…” Adrian starts, then stops, mouth open around something that he seems to think better of. _We know it was you_ , probably, or something like it. But that doesn’t really address what she’s upset about, does it?

But there’s really no way _to_ address it. Things are as they are. They’re strong enough between them to have ended Dracula and his war, but the church? Strength doesn’t come into it, when you’re trying to root out that kind of invasive, crawling evil. 

So, inadequate reassurance it is. “You know what you did, last night?” Trevor asks, narrowing his eyes at her.

“I helped us win a fight. I helped contain—”

“You saved my pathetic goddamned life. For probably the seventh time or so, at this point.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Adrian tilt his head, running the math in his head. “...just how many close calls _did_ you have in Braila?” he asks, obviously trying hard to mask his unease.

Trevor pitches his answer low. “They weren’t all in Braila.”

“...ah.”

“Sypha, listen,” Trevor says, doing his best despite his condition to lean across the table, to take her hand. “We’re working on it, but we already know that the world we want can’t be, just yet. But if it was, all it’d get you is some cheering and free ale from a few townsfolk who have a vague idea that you fought some demons. It’s kind of shit, and it doesn’t last. I am telling you that I _know_ , for an absolute fact, that _you_ are the only reason I’m sitting here being a bandage rack instead of dead and eaten and shat out somewhere. And if you think I’m ever going to stop being grateful for that—god, I’d hate to think you don’t know me at least that well.”

“And if you think he is the only one who is grateful,” Adrian adds, softly, “then you have not been paying attention.”

Sypha bites her lip, nods, not entirely convinced. “It is just frustrating, sometimes. That we’ve fought so hard for this world, and it still does not welcome us as we are.”

“I know,” Trevor says, squeezing her hand. There’s a pause, not awkward but definitely weighty, laden.

“Speaking of you being a bandage rack,” Adrian segues after a moment, less smoothly than he probably thinks. “How are you feeling?” 

Trevor looks up from Sypha, takes a quick inventory. He doesn’t feel _great_ , a faint, raw burning running through his entire body like the distant memory of bee stings, but… “Not terrible. A little woozy, still.”

“That’ll be the medicine—”

“The _opium_ ,” Trevor interrupts.

“—or possibly the blood loss.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty familiar at this point.” He levels a smirk on Adrian, watches as the dhampir goes visibly flustered, covering it up with a sip from his mug. When he sets it back down bare seconds later, he’s composed again, except that—

Trevor smirks harder, gestures with a finger. “You’ve got some, just…”

Adrian frowns, in that way he has that makes the entire world feel heavier. “ _Thank you_ , Belmont,” he says, not sounding thankful at all as he reaches up to rub the smudge of red from the corner of his mouth, very pointedly smearing it back onto the lip of the mug instead of licking it clean. Probably trying to make a point of his iron self-control, given their exchange last night—

Oh. Yeah, that’s a thing that happened.

“So,” Trevor says, then chews his lip for a second. “Last night. Sorry I, uh, _implied_ what I did, after the fight. I just haven’t ever seen you around that much at once—well, from a human, anyway, there was that minotaur—and it’s not that I really _thought_ you were going to—”

“I’ve been doing some reading,” Adrian interrupts, and the tone is back to calm fondness. “to clarify a few things I was confused about. Did you know, Trevor,” he asks, looking at the tabletop, not meeting Trevor’s eyes. “That even from a purely scientific perspective, there’s a rather large difference between blood spilt in battle, and blood spilt in the service of love?”

He lifts his eyes at the last, and there’s something in them that isn’t quite a challenge—more like an invitation. An invitation to admit these things sober and out loud.

Trevor doesn't take it, not yet. “I… didn’t, no.”

Still that steady gaze. “All sorts of chemicals floating around when you're fighting for your life, supposedly. Numbing pain, giving you the strength you need to survive the conflict."

Trevor shakes his head; this isn’t news. "Anyone who's fought something bigger and meaner than they are could tell you that."

"I'm sure. But there is less common knowledge; I’m only learning these things now, and only by experience. Blood offered up during lovemaking is, indeed, completely irresistible. The finest thing you’ve ever tasted. But fear and pain? And the poisons that come with them?” He shakes his head. “A lot of vampires claim to prefer them, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s no accounting for taste.”

“I can account for it,” Trevor says, curling his lip in disgust. “They’re horrible.”

“They’re not _all_ — _”_ Adrian cuts himself off, reevaluating what he’d been about to say. “Yes. I suppose the ones that delight in causing misery because it spices up their meal are, in fact, horrible.”

 _Ahah,_ Trevor thinks, _Gotcha._ He almost never wins in these verbal spars; he’s not sure why the victory feels hollow. “How’s it different?” he asks, and then immediately regrets it because why the hell does he want to know _that?_ It’s possible he’s not entirely sober yet after all.

And Adrian seems equally hesitant to answer, or unsure how; it’s clearly not something they have a common frame of reference for. “It’s… hard to explain. It’s as if you could _taste_ missed chances and bad decisions. The potential for something good that’s been ruined and spoiled.” A pause, then, and the hint of a mischievous grin. “Actually, it’s rather like when Sypha burns the toast. It isn’t just the taste—the smell lingers too, and for _days_ everything tastes like burnt toast—”

Sypha—who’d been listening with half an ear while she paged through a book on, as far as Trevor can tell, buildings or architecture or something like that—coughs around a mouthful of said toast and points an accusing finger at Adrian. “You burn it as often as I do!”

“Yes, but when I burn it, I throw it away and make more. I don’t just slather it in mountains of jam and hope no one will notice.”

“I still do _not_ understand,” Trevor says, low and irreverent, “why neither of you can make toast without burning it.”

Adrian and Sypha both turn as one to look at him—but it’s with the confusion of having lost a train of thought more than anything else. A few seconds pass in awkward silence.

“...we’ve lost the metaphor, I think,” Adrian says, uncertain, almost like a question. “Let me put this simply: Fear and stress taste terrible. You might as well have been covered in day-old, pot-scorched porridge last night. Theoretically edible, but not exactly something that makes one want to dive in for a taste.”

Huh. Okay, so that covers fighting and fucking, but… “What’s it like when nothing special is going on? Just, hey, I’m a nice person and you look hungry.”

Adrian shrugs, seems a little perplexed that Trevor is pursuing the topic so doggedly. Trevor’s honestly right there with him. “It’s just blood. Everyone's a little different, but it's nothing dramatic. I’m assuming you’ve been punched in the face enough times to be familiar.”

“He has been punched in the face more times than he has told you,” Sypha says, pointing with her jam knife. “But I think we were both assuming it was… different than that, for you?”

Adrian pauses, looks momentarily thrown. “...ah. I think you’re confusing two different things. Trevor, do you drink ale for the taste?”

Trevor frowns. “It’s not _all_ pisswater, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But do you drink it _for_ the taste.”

“No, I drink it to get fucking drunk.” He lifts a finger into the air, jabs with it. “Which I’ve been doing a lot less of lately, thank you.”

“Likewise, there’s a… need, a craving, that any blood will satisfy, regardless of the context. It’s an entirely different sensation than taste, and it’s where most of the allure is, _supposedly_. So, a feeding can be good in that regard but—”

“But otherwise taste like hallowed dog arse.”

Adrian’s eyebrows jump; he huffs an amused noise. “Not the phrasing I would have chosen, but yes. Or it can satisfy that need but taste like nothing beyond what that person happens to taste like.”

“Or it can taste like love,” Trevor says, quietly, and there: he’s fucking said it. Sober, even. They can’t ask any more of him.

“...yes,” Adrian says, equally quiet. “And that is far more powerful than simply scratching an itch. Something most of the others have never experienced.”

A beat of silence, as that sinks in.

Then Sypha puts her finger in the air, a request for a pause. “Wait. If this is all true,” she says, “then why are you always pinning him down and doing your creepy—”

“Spooky,” Trevor corrects, halfhearted. 

“Ah, of course. _Spooky_ vampire routine?”

Now Adrian smiles for real, straight-up amusement with just a slight predatory edge. He leans back in the chair, slouching gorgeously. “That’s not real fear,” he says, and he sounds smug as anything. “That’s just Trevor being turned on by the _idea_ of fear.”

“Oh ho,” Sypha says, grinning wickedly. “Is that true, Treffy?”

He supposes they expect him to protest, to put on a show of embarrassed, flustered denial—use the change of topic to get away from the things he’s actually scared of dwelling on. And sure, he doesn’t really understand _why_ it trips all his triggers, being held down by a fangy dhampir that is _absolutely definitely_ going to bite him _,_ but is also _absolutely definitely_ not going to actually kill him—some perverse thing with vulnerability and trust? The thrill of being able to look something that _should_ be terrifying in the eye and say, _bring it on, you don’t scare me?_ And even if he did understand it, he probably still couldn’t come up with an adequate defense. As it is, it’s too confusing to do anything but accept. 

Anyway, given the night he’s just had? He’s too tired. Fuck it. “Sure, so what?” he says, pushing the plate with its scraps of breakfast away from him. “You going to start trying to set the mood by jumping out of dark corners?”

Entertainment sparkles in her eyes. “What, and spoil you for Adrian? Never.”

“Nah. I don’t think jump scares are really going to do that. I think it needs to be real fear.”

“But what even _is_ ‘real fear’?” she demands. “Isn’t that different for everyone?”

Trevor’s about to say something like, _being slapped by a demon tail covered in sixty thousand daggers and then almost getting eaten by it while the people most likely to be haunted by the sight forever watch on_. But Adrian gets in ahead of him.

“The moment,” he says, “of realizing your own impending mortality and how utterly alone you are in it; the feeling of your life slipping away through your fingers no matter how hard you grasp; the existential dread of realizing that you have visualized a future for yourself that will now never come to pass.” Adrian waves his hand vaguely. “That sort of thing.”

“Oh,” Sypha laughs, a little performative. “Just that. Nothing all that bad.”

“All that canister shit must be horrible, then,” Trevor says, abrupt, because the thought just occurred. There’s no way Dracula did his _harvesting_ humanely; not during that year of rage and cruelty.

Adrian just nods, acknowledging. “It’s… it’s not enjoyable, no. But it serves its purpose.”

“That’s shitty. If I wasn’t torn all to hell,” Trevor says, side of his face resting in his hand, regarding Adrian with something that almost feels, from the inside, like a wistful sort of sympathy. “I’d offer you something better.”

A glare that could cut glass. “That is not happening.”

Trevor puts his hands up in surrender. “I know, I know. I’m already running too low.”

“I’m not, though,” Sypha says, smiling at Adrian with a kind, selfless glow in her eyes that nevertheless knows exactly what it's offering. She sets her hand on his arm, coaxing. “My treat?” 

There’s a suspended moment there, where Adrian just looks at her looking at him—Trevor can see the calculations in his head, the fact that he's not in dire need and it would therefore be  _wrong_ stacking up against the reality that she is _offering_ and he  _wants it_ —then returns the smile, a careful half-inch at a time.

And hell, if she’s game, why not? They’re getting nothing done today anyway, with him laid up; she’ll have time to heal, and maybe it’ll lead to more interesting things.

Trevor tries hard, most of the time, to not really think about just how strange his life has become.

* *

So, this is a thing that happens, that makes it even stranger: despite his admittedly low blood supply, Trevor manages to end up rock fucking hard, sitting here at the kitchen table and watching them. Just that; just _watching._

Watching the way they edge toward each other in their chairs, touch and mouth at each other in a quiet build. The soft smile on Sypha’s face and the breathy little noises she makes while Adrian kisses and licks all along her throat. The ripcord tension shivering through Adrian’s entire body as he fights to keep himself in control—and the way that control slips away the moment he shifts his mouth and bites down. 

Sypha gasps, and her eyes fly wide, her body taut—and Adrian _whines_ , a sound that works its way out from somewhere deep in his chest.

From this angle, Trevor can see details he’s never been privy to: the way fangs sink straight through flesh like it’s so much butter; the way the blood wells up around them in dark, shining pools; the way Adrian’s eyes roll back a bit, his hand nearly falling away from her face as his focus fades in and out.

Another careful shift in position, teeth slipping free. And it looks for all the world like he’s just _kissing_ the spot now, but Trevor can see the way his throat works around every swallow, can hear his raspy breath and the noises he's making. Is acutely aware of the way Sypha’s eyes have slid half-closed, eyelids fluttering and breath coming choppy in some primal rapture of intimacy.

Trevor wonders if that’s how _he_ looks, when they do this. Wonders if they’ll blame him for palming himself under the table, because good _god_.

Adrian pulls away after only a short while, pressing his thumb over the wounds to staunch the flow; this isn’t a proper feeding, even if it’d been a feeding _bite_. This was a treat, like the fruit tarts and the papanaşi and the pears, and they separate sated and pleased and flushed, a picture of debauchery—and Trevor can admit that everyone deserves dessert, now and then.

* *

“...I wasn’t afraid for myself,” Trevor says out of the blue a while later, picking at the tabletop. He’s still strung up tight, with no graceful way to let off his own head of steam. It’s fine; it’ll fade, and he’s in no condition for exertions right now, anyway. “Just to be clear about that. I don’t _get_  afraid for myself.”

A careful silence, as they decide how much of his bullshit to humor. 

“...I know,” Sypha says, finally, reaching across to take his hand back, fold it into hers. She’s a little sleepy-eyed, a little shaky, in the best of ways. The bite is low, is still oozing sluggishly, but Trevor’s already taken a good look and he knows it’s clotted up as well as it needs to be. “You were frightened for us.”

“I still am,” he says, watching the mark move as she talks, as she swallows. The admission doesn’t sting like it should. He’s been so damn lucky to find these people; he figures he’s got the right to be a little nervous about losing them. “If we don’t sort this out…”

A mob drunk on anger and righteousness and delusions of God’s grace. Torches and pitchforks and swords and arrows and _fire_. _They’d never succeed_ , Adrian had said, of the castle’s impermeability. But the three of them can’t stay inside the castle forever, and no line of defense is unbreakable, under the strain of a long enough siege.

“What do you propose?” Adrian asks, come back to himself, low and serious. And just like that—Trevor’s in charge again, still swathed in bandages and not twelve hours back from death’s gate. But it’s okay. He knows that whatever he comes up with, they will support him; they will throw everything they have into it and more.

Because they trust him—him, the lucky drunk, the rude and apathetic wanderer. The runt running around under his family’s crest and his family’s reputation, puffing himself up until he felt tall enough to fill out that tunic, to wear that sword strapped to his side without it scraping the ground as he walked.

They trust _him._

“We have to do what Maila said,” he says finally, the words rushing out like breath. “We have to talk to them, before the rumors get out of control. Give them the chance to make their own choice.” He hesitates, squeezing Sypha’s hand. “And we have to be ready for whatever choice they make.”

“Agreed,” Sypha says, quiet, and there’s some fear in her voice but it’s sitting alongside certainty and determination and that will, on the balance, have to do.

Adrian’s hand settles over both of theirs, what had been a comfort gesture now one of solidarity.

They will do what they need to.

And they will be ready.

* *

“When?” Adrian asks, later that night; they’re back in the bedroom, and he’s unwinding some of the bandages, letting the more superficial wounds out into the air where they’ll heal better, now that they’ve closed enough to stave off infection. What’s left is the messier, more rushed wrapping they’d done down in the town, over the deeper slashes and punctures that had been doing the lion’s share of the bleeding. Adrian sets about redoing those, more carefully, a jar of stinking salve on the corner of the bed.

“Before that has all healed,” Sypha answers before Trevor can, cutting right to his own thoughts on the matter. She’s curled against Trevor’s good side, is tracing idle patterns on his skin, the heat of her trailing after her touch like fiery leylines across his body. “We do not want them forgetting what Trevor did for them.”

“What _we_ did,” Trevor insists.

“A day or two, then.” Adrian reaches to touch a few crisscrossed lines across Trevor’s cheek with a cool, careful fingertip. “With the salve I’m using, these will heal quickly and well; they may not even scar. So unless you were planning to address the crowd shirtless—”

“Not something we would mind,” Sypha chimes in, raking fingernails over him and tweaking a nipple without warning; the shock goes straight to the base of his spine, wanders leisurely from there to his dick. He squirms, and Adrian scolds both of them wordlessly, all mundane irritated noises. They’re messing up his work, here. Sypha just buries her face in Trevor’s neck, laughing there, something about Adrian being a giant spoilsport.

“A few days is fine,” Trevor says, breathless, caught somewhere between arousal and awe.

* *

So they give him another day to get his strength back up, and they prune down the bandages, and boiled or slathered in salve or not, he’s still fucking shocked every time the cloth peels away to reveal a wound that _isn’t_ red and puffy and burning with heat. It’s not that every injury he’s ever had has festered like that, but he thinks maybe there’s something in the dirt, in the soil—ground can be cursed as well as consecrated, and there’s a lot of vengeful spirits out there whose old bodies are nothing but earth, now—and these wounds definitely came into very intimate contact with the ground last night.

Adrian just mutters about superstitious nonsense when he brings it up that night, opines that they should fear the things that are alive in the dirt instead of the things that are dead in it. How much he’d bled, apparently, had been a good thing, washing away the soil, and hell, even Trevor knows that much. That’s just basic wilderness survival. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong about the dirt being _cursed._ Or something. Makes more sense than invisible, ravenous, poison-shitting _creatures_ living in it, anyway.

Sypha puts her book aside—it’s open to a section on rudimentary stonelaying, and he imagines ‘how to build a house’ is not high priority in the education of nomads—and watches over Adrian’s shoulder as he sketches. He’s drawing out rough floor plans, taking drawings he’s already done of the ruins and building out from those bones, extending walls and making archways whole again and filling in the gaps. It doesn’t look like the house Trevor remembers, thank god. He doesn’t want the ghost of his old life given substance again; he wants a home for the family he has now.

 _This is why_ , he thinks, watching Adrian’s graceful fingers pull the form out of nothingness, out of the blankness of a page, all flowing lines and detailed accents and undeniable, indelible _hope._ This is why they are doing this; this is what they are risking everything _for_. For this, for the future they can only imagine, they will put everything they have now on the line. Again and again.

At the end of the day, Trevor checks himself in the mirror again, and Adrian’s right: the tears and slices marring up the right side of his face are scabbed up and healing and fading quickly, and he knows: _Tomorrow._

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thirsty babs, in more ways than one. If Trevor could just stop hurting himself, he could help out with that!
> 
> We're in the home stretch here, folks! One more chapter left ~~and it's basically already written wooha~~ and then we're on to the sequel!
> 
> I'm sorry that these idiots talk so much spaghetti. They are honestly uncontrollable when they start talking and it's time I admitted that I'm not really running the show.
> 
> Also: i guess opium was used as medicine even in Europe up to the 1300s or so but after that it became regarded as 'eastern' and therefore sinful. Because you know, everything was sinful at that point.
> 
> I hope what Adrian's going on about makes sense. It's not something he's used to having to explain.


	14. Chapter 14

*

It’s a beautiful day as they approach the town, the sky blue and crisp and the air unseasonably warm the way it can sometimes be in mid-autumn, a respite from all the mist and rain. It’s possible that some distant thunder and the drama of a lightning strike or two might have served to herald their arrival with more portent, but then the people would all be indoors, hiding from the weather, and this serves no purpose if no one hears it.

Whatever ‘this’ turns out to be.

Trevor hasn’t entirely decided yet, has refused to even try to script it out in advance, and he knows that has Sypha and Adrian nervous. It’s making him a little nervous too; his off-the-cuff speeches in the past have ranged from soaring, moving masterpieces to _Listen, I used to fight fucking vampires_. He figures he’s stacking the odds in favor of the former by not doing this drunk off his stupid arse, but there’s always an element of rolling the dice.

He’s dressed for a fight, in full emblazoned Belmont glory. Whip coiled against one hip, ancestral sword on the other, throwing knives tucked into place, everything freshly laundered and mended. His face is still a mess of healing lacerations, a few of the remaining bandages visible here and there—a broad swath just under the curl of his tunic’s collar where a slice had been deep enough to require stitches, and another creeping out from the cuff of his bracer to span his palm where one of the spines went straight through. _Look at how stoic I am,_ it all says, _in the face of the damage I took saving your sorry asses._

So much of this is going to come down to showmanship, and honestly, Trevor needs all the props and assistance he can get.

Adrian and Sypha are walking that same balance: Sypha’s in full robes but with her hood down, and is lending the air around herself a crackle of magic without making it obvious that that’s what she’s doing; Adrian has his hand resting on the hilt of his sword, the intimidating length of it trailing out behind his regal, gold-trimmed coat, and he is making no effort to avert his uncanny eyes—but not a bit of fang in sight, and they’ve made sure he’s well-fed enough to have some color in his face. The sunny day provides another layer of cover. Let the townsfolk be _unsettled_ but not _threatened;_ let them have a glimpse of their strength, but give them no means to point at them and hang names or words on them, words that will stir the fear of the crowds and doom them all. _Witch. Vampire. Heretic._

It doesn’t look like Acasă has been troubled by any more attacks in the intervening days; they’ve cleared away the rubble, turned over the dirt where the ground had been scorched, are already halfway through rebuilding the broken structures—stoneworkers mending the town’s injuries as surely as Adrian and Sypha had mended his. It’s nominally a market day—they seem to have them twice a week—but with so much of the square unusable, it’s less bustling than it might have been. There are still plenty of people milling about, working on repairs or doing some bartering on the side or catching up on gossip or just being social, the ones who are too old or infirm for labor. And the more dedicated stall keepers are doing what they can, crammed together in the one corner of the square that took less damage, wares spread out on blankets on the ground wherever the carts and stands don’t fit.

That’s where they aim for, heads high, aware of every look they garner from the crowd but careful not to acknowledge any of it. By the time they get to the most populous corner, there’s a small crowd trailing behind them, following out of morbid curiosity or maybe just ordinary curiosity. A lot of them are young, may have heard the name _Belmont_ in passing but never seen the crest on his back before today.

The three of them stop as one, perfectly synchronous without needing a word to pass between.

They’re not high up; there’s no speaking stage here, no good place to address a crowd from. There _is_ a band of space around them, the entire crowd giving them a wide berth, splitting open as they walked like the red fucking sea. Trevor doesn’t care, just claps his hands twice, sharply, to get the attention of those nearest by. The rest will fall into place once he starts talking, he hopes.

Two dozen heads turn toward the noise. There are more looks, more shocked expressions. He feels a thrill of uncertainty rip through him, a wave of tension that straightens his spine and locks his jaw, and he thinks, _Am I really the one who should be doing this?_ Not just between the three of them, but is he even the _Belmont_ that should be doing this? Is he the representation his family needs, the best face forward that’s going to finally clear their name? What kind of ambassador is _he_?

For just a second, he can’t imagine why he ever thought this was going to work.

Sypha, a whisper at his side: “Trust yourself, Trevor.”

A leather-clad hand settles onto his opposite shoulder. He can hear words in that, too: _And trust us to have your back._

Trevor takes a breath, clears his throat. “You’re all busy people, so I’m going to cut straight to it,” he says, lending his voice as much volume as he can without actually shouting. “We were here three nights ago. I got myself torn to hell fighting off the demons that came here to kill you. You know who I am.”

“You’re the ghost of the ruins!”

“Right, because ghosts are so well known for fucking _bleeding_ ,” Trevor says, holding the bandaged hand up and rolling his eyes at the idiot at the edge of the crowd. He’d really expected better, in terms of crazy accusations. “Could you _try_ to pay attention?”

A wild muttering ripples through the crowd then, and Trevor can’t say he likes the tone of it, but at least the heckler shrinks back a bit, looking confused and embarrassed—like a dog scolded for shitting in the bed without fully understanding why it was wrong. 

“You know who I am,” Trevor repeats, “And I’d wager you know why I’m here.”

“To summon demons down on us!” shouts one indistinct voice.

“To sacrifice us to the devil!” shouts another.

“To take your revenge,” says a quieter voice, from somewhere behind him. It sounds female, aged, almost infirm; it sounds like it’s speaking from experience. And no wonder: all around them, the detritus of one man’s bitter vengeance. 

“I’d be justified,” Trevor says, and he’s smiling against his will, doesn’t know where it’s coming from. It feels like reinforcement, like steel bars across a door. “Fifteen years ago, a good chunk of you stood by or _helped_ while the church murdered my family. You let a boy get away—sent him off with a bloody gash and a fear of fire and an entire family’s excommunication to bear on his back. And I’m not sure what you thought would happen when the boy grew up—when he outgrew the fear and the scars and giving a shit what the church thought of him.”

That’s got them—they’re rapt, hanging on his every word. Maybe waiting for him to declare his vengeance officially, to pull the sword from his belt and swear an oath on their lives, to demand retribution in blood. Or maybe too many of them just honestly don’t know what he’s talking about and are fascinated by the dramatic turn market day has taken.

And that’s the real crux of it, isn’t it?

“I’m sure you didn’t expect him to come back and _fight for you anyway_ ,” he continues, keeping his face tipped into the light. “Honestly? Neither did I.”

Too many of them weren’t here all those years ago, is the problem. And they _probably_ deserve better than to be abandoned to the forces of darkness just because they moved into a house previously owned by a murdering shitstain. Maybe. Deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least.

Out in the crowd, in the midst of all the confusion Trevor can see lazily bubbling to the surface, the man from the terrible vegetable stall is grinning like the top of his head’s going to fall off. The more level-headed woman from the fruit stand is looking up at them thoughtfully, curiously, no hasty bad decisions brewing. The stranger from the water line, the one who’d tried to get him to take a break from his efforts while he bled into the buckets, is squinting at him, edging closer, trying to get a look at the scabby mess of his face.

Maila, further out, her expression charged with a grim, subdued hope. And all the others, their faces ranging from hostility to fear to unease to cautious optimism.

Time to get all the cards on the table, then, and stop playing this game with his motivations. Trevor sighs, crosses his arms in front of himself. “Here’s the thing. I was going to go on about how we’re the courageous idiots who took out Dracula for you all,” he starts, and that’s true; he hadn’t scripted it but he’d had an idea about content and tone, and now he’s going off those rails completely, but: _trust yourself._ “About how we saved the world and you ought to be grateful—and yes.” He holds one hand up as if forestalling a protest. “I realize there are still demons wandering through sometimes, but they’re the stragglers of a war that’s over. The fact that you’ve got the bastard’s castle looming over the town and you’re _not_ dealing with horde attacks and blood raids every single night should be proof enough of that.”

Another wave of incomprehensible mumbling, but there’s an up note to it that sits a little better in his ears than what they’d been doing before.

“Now,” he continues, when the murmur dies down, “That’s all well and good, but we’re not asking for a damn hero’s parade, here. All we’re asking for is to be left alone. And I think you owe us at least that much.”

“You _caused_ all of this!” a voice shouts from midway through the crowd, and Trevor scans the faces, looking for—ah. Yeah, okay, that’s a face he fucking recognizes. Easy—count to ten. Now’s not the time. “Of course you’ve stopped the attacks—you’re trying to trick us into letting our guard down!”

More confused tittering. “But… Dracula…” the man next to the heckler starts.

“Dracula my _arse_ ,” the man says, vicious. “Dracula’s a myth, a made up pile of bullshit to get us to overlook the real, human evil behind it all.” He points at Trevor, accusingly. “Humans playing with forces they shouldn’t, and evil we _thought_ we burnt out of our lives for once and for all!”

Trevor breathes carefully through his teeth. He can feel Adrian tensing beside him, can feel an uptick in the temperature to his other side. He puts on his best _I don’t give a shit_ face, blended up with a little _I can’t believe you just said something that stupid_ , and looks out at the crowd. Waits, expectant.

“But if he’s a myth,” a third man finally says, genuinely confused, “and all of that was made up the whole time, then where did the castle come from?”

A stretch of silence, as the first man visibly loses his momentum. “Ah… I mean… we don’t _know_ …”

“You’d really rather believe,” Trevor says, fixing on the man with a gaze that feels like a razor, “that alllll of that death and destruction and pure fucking evil was the work of a single, ordinary human doing it for no apparent reason, than accept the existence of a well known and extensively documented supernatural figure who had an also well known reason to be furious with us? Really?”

“I’m just saying,” the man continues, digging in his heels like someone who’s put a lot of time and effort into making a mistake and isn’t willing to stop making it. “We don’t _know_ that’s Dracula’s castle.”

“But we found all of those dead vampires,” the woman next to him says, like this is a commonplace thing one finds outside of one’s town every day, just littering the goat pastures. Honestly, living in the shadow of the Belmont estate for 400 years, they might think that it is. “Couldn’t get the smell out for weeks! Was that a myth, too?”

And, well, that answers the question of what Adrian did with all of the bodies littering the castle. Dropped them all outside and then forgot about them, it seems like. To be fair—and Trevor finds he’s a lot more inclined to be fair, these days—he’d had a lot on his mind at the time, and not a lot of clear thinking to go around.

“Speaking of vampires,” another man says, closer to the front of the group; he’s been sidling up slowly, eyeing Adrian the entire time but silent until now. His tone is contemptuous, vaguely threatening. “How do we know you aren’t working _with_ Dracula? I don’t much like the look of your friend, there.”

A collectively drawn breath at the implication, and damn these people actually being astute, after all those centuries in proximity to the greatest hunters of the supernatural the world has ever seen.

So Trevor huffs a laugh, covers it with his hand like he’s trying to stifle it. Looks to Adrian, who’s smirking back at him with a very convincing incredulity. Then Trevor lifts the hand up to gesture at the sky—the brilliantly sunny sky, only the wispiest clouds in sight—and looks to the man who’d spoken with his eyebrows raised, a nonverbal _Well?_

“...oh,” the man says, flatfooted. “Well, I mean… I…”

“You said something stupid,” Trevor says, making every attempt at good natured, magnanimous humor. “Don’t worry, happens to the best of us.”

A chuckle, here and there. The man still looks angry, but just in that way of having been caught making a mistake. Like the first heckler, the one with his ridiculous assertion that Trevor was a _ghost_ , he shrinks back. If they’re lucky, the two accusations will carry equal weight, going forward.

“Look,” Trevor says, once the attention is back on him. “My family lived in that house for four centuries, and we fought the dark things for you, and we never asked for anything, and we _never_ brought any misfortune down on anyone. The church told you otherwise, and I get it—they’re hard to stand up to. But those of you who’ve been around a while should remember that this town was once the safest place to live in all of Wallachia.” Truth. He’d been shocked as a boy, the first few outside towns he’d seen, how afraid people were of the dark, and how afraid they were of each other. “Because _we_ were here. Because we protected it. Not for our own gain, but because it’s what was right. If you want that back? All you have to do is _leave us be_.”

We. Us. Not the same _us_ it used to be; not the Belmonts. Adrian has shifted an inch closer, his shoulder brushing Trevor’s, and Sypha’s got a hand to his back, mostly out of sight. Something warm and painful and soft-edged swells in his chest. “Leave us be, and we’ll keep watch over that awful castle and keep anything worse from moving in, and we’ll come down here and spend money in your market, and we’ll hunt down all the terrifying things that come sniffing around this place. And hell,” he says, smiling grimly at his own marvelous generosity, “we’ll even leave your church alone, if it leaves us alone—no matter what kind of hypocritical fucks you’ve got running it these days. Just don’t listen to them when they try to tell you who to kill, or the deal’s off.” 

It’s weird—there are still no obvious church men around. Just like the other day. He knows they exist, Maila said as much, but he’s yet to see one, and for reasons he can’t pin down, that’s making him nervous. Maybe he just likes to know who his enemies are.

“The church ain’t real!” shouts a half-drunk farmer from the edge of the crowd.

Oh. That’s… interesting. “How are they _not real?_ ” Adrian asks from his side, pitched for Trevor and Sypha and otherwise only audible to the nearest of the townspeople. 

“I have no idea.” Trevor’s admittedly a little thrown off; there are _so many_ ways something could be ‘not real’ in this day, and he isn’t sure what angle to approach from.

“We’re not the _same_ church,” comes a quiet voice from his side, low and serpentine but not overtly threatening. A snake sunning on a rock. “And some of the locals haven’t come to terms with that yet.”

Trevor turns his head to regard the… what, the priest? Deacon? Pastor? He’s got that air of moral superiority but he’s not dressed like any church man Trevor’s ever seen, draped in dark green and grey, so it’s a little harder to tease out a title. He’s managed to step right up beside them, into the gap that everyone else had found uncrossable, is uncomfortably inside of their collective personal space. Doesn’t look armed. Doesn’t seem to be tensing for a fight.

“Come speak with me,” he says, nearly a whisper, glancing between all three of them. “After you’re done here. Behind the church, where the gazebos stand by the creek.”

Not _in_ the church—behind it. Either he’s seen through the sunlight ruse or he’s in agreement with Trevor as to an excommunicant’s odds of catching fire inside the actual building. Either way, he’s clever, and that could be dangerous.

“Fine,” Trevor says, guarding, doing his best to keep all of that out of his voice. “We’ll find you.”

The man nods, quietly excuses himself. Trevor turns back to the crowd, finds them watching expectantly. 

“Right. As I was saying,” he forges on. “You can leave us be, or you can give in to fear, and try to burn this family of mine out of our home like you did the last one. But it won’t go well for you.” He grins, tries to look as amiable and harmless as he can. “That’s not a threat. It’s simply what will happen. We aren’t distracted; we don’t have kids and servants to protect this time. It’s just us.”

Then his expression narrows, brows pulling in. “And if you come for us, we will _fight like hell._ But I really hope—for all our sakes—that we don’t have to.”

A long pause, letting that sink in. Letting it _really get in there_ , letting the gravity of the decision they’ve been presented with drag at their heels a little.

“That’s the choice before you,” he finishes, with what he hopes is a flourish. “Now, if you’ll excuse us. We’ve got a representative of the _apparently not real_ church to see.”

The crowd is not, as they take leave of it, firmly on their side. It’s also not rallying to tear them to pieces, a risk they took by travelling this way, on the ground, among them. It does still part for them, respect or fear or both, and by the time they get clear of the square and into the sparser territory of the outlying roads, Trevor feels reasonably justified in letting out a sigh of relief.

The day isn’t over. The fight isn’t over. But they’ve planted the seed and they’ve gotten out with their skins intact, so far.

However. “What the hell,” he asks both of them, once they’re out of earshot of anyone else, “is a fucking gazebo?”

They look back at him, suddenly intensely amused, Sypha stifling genuine laughter. Clearly they know the answer, but they don’t deign to answer. Fine. As long as they're not worried, then fine.

Fine. 

* *

Turns out, it’s just a fancy fucking word for a pavilion. He’s not some Philistine, he’s seen the damn things before, he’s just never heard them called that—and can anyone really blame him? _Gazebo_. It sounds like some kind of two-headed, baby-eating antelope.

The man who spoke to them in the square is standing under the gabled roof of the nearest one, afternoon sun slanting through the missing slats to stripe and mottle him, green eyes cool in the shadowed, fading daylight. He has his hands clasped in front of himself, posture relaxed. He is being as calculatedly non-threatening as it is possible for a person to be.

As if that’s going to fool any of them.

“So, let’s get this over with,” Trevor says, stopping just shy of the edge of the thing. “If you were planning to move against us regardless, you wouldn’t have asked to talk. You’ve got a deal to cut, so what is it?”

“I understand your hostility,” the man says, crossing the floor of the pavilion to meet them at the stair. “I’m not just saying that to placate you; I truly do. Yours wasn’t the only family broken to pieces by that particular branch of the church, by righteousness grown wicked on its own overconfidence.”

No, it wasn’t. Both the people flanking him can fucking attest to that. “I’m listening,” he says, committing to nothing.

“I’m the pastor of this parish,” the man says, extending a cautious hand. “But I was not operating on the church’s orders when I approached you in the marketplace.”

“You were just there at that precise time,” Sypha cuts in, skepticism plain in her voice. “That is very convenient.”

The pastor lets his hand drop to his side. “You don’t trust me, and I don’t expect you to. I can tell that none of you have been treated well by the church at large. But you should know that this appointment is… a somewhat remote position. I have no immediate oversight that isn’t a week’s ride away; the church _at large_ isn’t a presence here. So should you truly wish to be left alone, I am amenable to that, on my own condition.”

“This should be good,” Trevor mutters under his breath.

“I ask only that you don’t meddle in our affairs,” the pastor says, and it should sound shady but there’s something pleading in his tone that takes Trevor aback. “We are struggling as it is, to win the minds of the populace here. Whether you believe it or not, we _are_ here to help, and we _do_ regret what others have done in the name of a God that we know would not approve.”

Trevor narrows his eyes, lip curling in a snarl. “How _exactly_ are you planning on helping? Last time a man of the cloth told me he was helping his flock, it was by manipulating them into murdering Speakers.”

Eyes widening slightly, the pastor glances toward Sypha, then back to Trevor. He’s gone a little pale. “ _Christ in Heaven_. Nothing like that, I assure you,” he says, rushed and appalled. “We’re providing shelter and food to those whose homes are destroyed in these attacks—one of the priests knows a touch of medicine.”

“That’s all?”

“We’re doing what we _can._ But if your vitriol against us undermines our efforts, the next pastor or priest that comes here may not even be doing those things. And he may be a lot more inclined to, as you say, move against you.”

“But you’re not,” Trevor says, blunt ended like it isn’t a question. “Why?”

The pastor looks down for a moment, sets his hand on the bannister of the gazebo. When he looks up again, there’s a pall of broken, disillusioned youth on his face, an echo of what Trevor remembers in those early years of discovering just how thoroughly the world had turned against him. On this man’s face, it is startling, jarring. 

“I grew up here,” he says, and how old is he, anyway? Thirty, thirty-five? “I remember the time before and I remember the time after. It _felt_ safer, after. It was not actually safer. Creatures still ran rampant in the night; black magic still crept its poisonous way across the landscape. Some claimed it was because your family was not eradicated thoroughly _enough_. But that was laughable. There was only a boy left—a child. You?”

Trevor nods, short and tight.

“I am a man of God,” the pastor says, bringing his hands back together in front of himself, a loose clasp. “I have faith in things that man cannot hope to understand, and I trust God’s plan. Blindly, perhaps. But contrary to what some people might say in the aftermath of Târgoviște—that does not make me a fool. I know what happened in the spring, up on that hillside where your home once stood, and I know what happened in the town square three nights ago. Anyone who could have watched that and not understood what they were seeing—well, perhaps they ought to pray to God for help with their vision.”

For a moment, that just sits there. The words read almost scripted, designed to appeal to them, to play to their egos. But it doesn’t _feel_ scripted.

“So,” Adrian says, voice cool and tense, “you’ll refrain from violently persecuting us as long as we don’t stir the town against you.”

“Or start summoning demons,” the man says, with a tip of his head to one side, the faintest of smiles. “Though I don’t expect that’s on your agenda.”

Trevor can’t help but laugh then, a low sound of amused disbelief. “You people and your demon summoning. Do you not realize how bloody _impossible_ that is? It took Dracula a _year_ to get his army together; you think ordinary people can just summon them up over the weekend for fun?”

A stretch of silence then. Adrian looks like he wants to say something but also doesn’t want to. The pastor is just looking at him, a little more worried than before.

“You’re… missing the point, Trevor,” Sypha says, cautious.

“We’re not going to summon any demons,” Trevor says, rolling his eyes, because fine, okay, they want his word, they’ve got it. “Okay? Deal.” His expression darkens then, drawing in. “But if you’re playing us...”

“I’m not. I swear it on my faith.”

“If you’re playing us,” Trevor continues, “Then I hope that faith is strong, because _God help you.”_

* *

They make their excuses. They go back to the market, poke around, buy a few things. There are no chickens, because they take up too much space, but the woman who usually sells them promises she will have them here by next market day.

They get a few sour looks. A few children clutched away from them in fear. But there are just as many quiet words of thanks and subdued, awe-filled stares. A woman and a small child, the ones they saved from their hiding place in the square three days ago, walk up to them without hesitation; the child has a wrinkled sheet of paper in her hand, on which she’s scrawled a fairly decent—for a three year old—rendition of herself and her mother, sitting on the ground, loomed over by an abstract squiggle of black that can only be a night creature. A figure far less detailed than herself or her mother is attacking it with a stick that is probably actually a sword.

Not that he hasn’t taken on demons with little more than a pointed stick, once upon a time.

“Thank you,” Trevor says to her, serious as he would to any adult, kneeling down to her level to accept it; she gets shy then, tangling herself in her mother’s skirts. “It’s lovely.”

* *

The walk back from Acasă feels light, expansive. The unseasonal warm weather makes it feel like months ago, after the troubles they never expected to survive but before these recent events were set in motion, before everyday, not-saving-the-world life got so complicated and twisted up and real. The future had seemed so foolishly wide open and limitless then, and Trevor supposes that it still does. It's just going to take some careful maneuvering, some willingness to meet these things head on. So there are weird messages left by probably-vampires in the woods and shaky, uncertain relations with an entire town sitting within spitting distance and some bizarre business with the monster in the town, the one that’d seemed specifically designed to stymie a Belmont—and all the hovering threats still lurking further out, far enough out that Trevor can't really feel the shape of them. So what? They've dealt with worse, and he still has a home to rebuild and a legacy to mend up and people he loves like he's never loved anyone, and there are still parts of the castle that need cleaning and repairing—because the castle will never really be clean, never truly be whole, but there’s a catharsis in trying anyway. 

He thinks about traversing the axle of those giant gears under Greşit, arms out to his sides because three points define a pivot, and he knows: it's about balance.

They wind up down at the stream, aimless and strangely unburdened. The current’s level is low, like it always is in the autumn, the high mountain peaks starting to lock up some of its water in ice and snow. There's no mistaking how late in the season it's become; the light is sharp and warm yellow, casting their shadows against the browning grass with a razor-edged finality. The red of his half-cape is unnaturally bright in the pre-sunset light, blown out and luminous.

It _is_ warm, though, almost as warm as a summer evening, and it feels completely natural to settle down on the edge of the stream, Sypha toeing off her sandals and letting her feet dip into the rushing water. But if the air’s warm the water is still _cold;_ she hisses between her teeth, flinching back instinctively before consciously overriding it, pushing her feet firmly under the surface. Her face is screwed up in a rictus of concentration and focus, and it’s hilarious.

"Oh, don't look at me like that," she scolds, and that’s the only way Trevor knows he has such a stupid, amused grin on his face. She looks at him slyly, now that she’s seemingly adjusted to the shock. "I would very much like to see _you_ do that without flinching."

"That sounds like a challenge," Adrian intones. He's already kicking lightly at the water with his boots still on, and it's on the tip of Trevor's tongue to accuse the man of cheating but he's... honestly not sure about the running water thing, whether it can actually do any damage, and it might start an argument that he isn’t really in the mood for right now.

Which means: he has to accept Sypha’s dare. "Fine," he says, grousing theatrically. He pulls a boot off, tosses it over his shoulder, reaches for the other one, strips off the slightly holey socks. "Overheated in all this gear anyway."

He pauses for a second with his feet above the water, takes a breath, and plunges them in and _oh holy shitfucking christ on a bastard orange milkcow_ it's _cold._ But he doesn't flinch back. He doesn't. He exhales through his teeth, slow and measured—breathes through the awful feeling of his feet going _literally white_ from the cold.

A slow clap from Sypha’s other side, Adrian being his usual arsehole self, and Sypha laughs and hangs off of his shoulder while he shivers, and the comfortable familiarity of it is warming enough that he—well, no, he notices the chill. It’s got _teeth_. But it’s just that little bit more tolerable, for their company.

* *

They stay down by the water until the sun disappears over the western horizon, taking with it the last of the day’s strange warmth and leaving space for the cool tendrils of night to wind their way in. They’ve all pulled their feet from the water, one-up-manship given way to the realities of the season, and in the twilight shadows, Sypha looks like a tree nymph—green plumes of plaited grass are stuck in her hair and behind her ears at every imaginable angle. The disguise is courtesy of Adrian’s restless fiddling with the long, soft grass that’s still alive and thriving down here by the waterline, a mindless habit they’ve seen him at before, in the garden and even in the baths, playing with the damp ends of his own hair.

It feels like the kind of thing Trevor would have teased him about, before—what kind of warrior-scholar son of the most powerful monster in the world knows how to _braid_?—but he can guess at the answer now and bringing it up would be its own kind of cruelty. He just leans back on his hands instead, chewing idly on a blade of the same grass, leaving them to their greenery and silliness. The season’s last fireflies are starting to come out, weaving in and out of the blades of grass like tiny, restless spirits; they’ve all earned the luxury of a little bit of whimsy, at this point. 

That said, there is something more serious he has to attend to, here. He waits until their amusement spends itself, until they’re as quiet as he is, as quiet as the dusk is, the whole world silently breathing itself.

“So,” Trevor says, interrupting that tidal quiet. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Adrian says, knee-jerk, and Trevor can hear the smile in his voice.

“Yeah, fuck you too,” Trevor says; he chuckles warmly. “We done?”

“Mm. Yes. Go ahead.”

Instead of continuing with words, Trevor reaches to his belt, draws out that Celtic longknife, the theft of which had set so much of this bullshit in motion. He grips it by the sheath, offers it wordlessly across to where Adrian’s sitting.

Sitting, and now also peering back at him with a narrowed, skeptical gaze.  

“Go on,” Trevor says, gesturing with the knife’s hilt. 

“That’s consecrated, Trevor,” Sypha says, like she’s worried Trevor might have hit his head. 

“Yeah, see,” Trevor says, smirking as he sets the knife back into his own lap, reaching to unhook the whip from his belt. “I have a theory about that. Because this is, too.” He lifts the whip into view, carelessly unspooling one of its loops. “And both times I hit you with it, it didn’t do shit.”

“I would beg to differ. It was exceptionally painful.”

“Well, sure,” Trevor says, shrugging. “It’s a _whip_. It’s meant to hurt like hell. But it didn’t burn you, or set you on fire, or do anything that a completely ordinary whip wouldn’t have done.”

He dangles the loose length of the whip between them, an unspoken dare. “So I have to ask, Adrian Țepeș. Have you just been _assuming_ , or have you actually touched a blessed object, or holy water, or anything like that?”

A long, irritated sigh. “No. I haven’t. It seemed like a fair assumption, and not something worth experimenting with.”

Trevor raises an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound very scientific to me.”

A long, charged moment, the challenge fairly humming in the air between them. And it looks like Sypha’s about to intervene, to push the whip back to Trevor and stop this nonsense before someone gets hurt. Then Adrian reaches out, lightning quick, and grasps the dangling bit of woven leather with the kind of tentative grip a person normally uses for the handle of a fire iron that might be blistering. Ready to release again in an instant.

He holds fast instead, and Trevor catches himself holding his breath—but there’s no smell of burning skin, no wisps of smoke rising from the dhampir’s fist.

“See?” Trevor gloats, exhaling hard on a broken laugh. “I knew it. Nobody’s _born_ damned.”

Sypha frowns. “I thought _everyone_ was born damned, according to the church.”

“Well, sure,” Trevor says, shrugging. “If you buy that. But not damned enough to _catch fire_ from holy water, or baptisms would be nothing but Sunday morning baby roasts.”

“It doesn’t feel like _nothing_ ,” Adrian says, clearly fascinated by this turn of events to the point that he doesn’t even register Trevor’s smugness or the talk of burning infants. “It’s sort of… tingling? Humming, almost.”

Huh. That’s… interesting. That’s how he’d probably describe it too, that feeling he gets picking up anything consecrated—an extra sense, almost, and a gift that’s come down his family line. It’s how they’ve always been able to suss out the truly blessed weapons from the ones that just have a lot of flashy crosses on them or happen to have been found in a church with no other provenance. _A natural affinity for the sacred_ , his father had told him once. _A resonance._

“That’s weird,” Trevor says, more to himself than anyone else. He gives the whip a light tug; Adrian drops it, and he winds it back up into its usual tight loops to stash it back on his belt. It’s weird but he’s still managed to prove his point, and that’s what matters. And it’s probably two different effects entirely that they just happen to be describing in the same way. Lots of things feel like tingling—resonant energy, sure, but also something putting a pathetic, lackluster effort into burning the unholy flesh from your bones. “Anyway. Here,” he says, offering the knife again.

This time, Adrian takes it, and just like with the whip: no fire, no flinching away. “Why?”

“Couple of reasons.” When Trevor said he’d been thinking, he hadn’t been making that up. He enumerates them on his fingers. “One, we’ve got this unknown threat that, let’s be realistic here, is _probably_ more fucking vampires. And Carmilla and all the rest of them are still out there, and they will _not_ expect you to be carrying something like this. Probably don’t think you _can_ , just like you didn’t. Two, it’s easier to conceal than the sword, so you won’t have to go unarmed ever, really. Three, it almost killed you, which as far as I’m concerned, gives you first right to claim it.”

“Four,” Sypha chimes in, “it is technically already yours, as it was in the hold when Trevor bequeathed it to you.”

“ _Four_ ,” Trevor continues, shooting her a glare. “It started out with one friend of the family—I think it’s only right it end up with another.”

He trails off after that, suddenly captivated as Adrian turns the knife in his hand, admiring the pewter detail work on the crossguard. “Only four reasons?” he asks, a light tease. “You said you’d been _thinking_ ; I was expecting more than that.”

“Okay, fine,” Trevor says, rolling his eyes. “ _Five_ : You’ve got two fucking hands, start using them both.”

“...I was never actually trained to do that,” Adrian says, holding his left hand up as if it were a puzzle. “My weapons schooling was extremely… traditional.”

“It’s not as hard as it looks.” Trevor sets his chin on his fist, watching with unmasked appreciation as Adrian pulls the blade free from the sheath and finds his grip on it, turning it in the fading light. He’d spent hours cleaning the thing, scouring away every speck of the blood that’d been burned onto its silvered surface, and it’d been worth it; it’s a thing of beauty. Perfectly suited to its wielder. “I’ll show you some things. You’ll pick it up in no time.”

“Easy for you to say,” Adrian muses, “Being ambidextrous.”

“He is, isn’t he?” asks Sypha.

“I’m what the hell now?” asks Trevor, feeling vaguely concerned and more than vaguely insulted.

Sypha giggles, damn her. “It just means that you can use both hands equally well. Which now that I think about it, makes sense of some things I’ve seen you do.”

Pft. Trevor throws his spitballed piece of grass at Adrian. “You couldn’t just say that? Had to use some fancy word just to watch me get confused.”

“It’s the _correct_ word for…” Adrian trails off, pulling the wad of grass from his hair. He flicks it away, vaguely disgusted, wipes his fingers on the trailing edge of his shirt—but he’s shaking his head, grinning despite himself. “...never mind. Thank you. I’ll do my best to put it to good use.”

“I know your type,” Trevor teases. “You’ll be better than me in an hour and still bitching about how poorly you think you’re doing.”

“I somehow doubt that,” Adrian says, sheathing the knife, wordlessly hooking it to his spare weapon belt. After a moment, guarded: “Friend of the family?”

Trevor laughs then, the tension finally broken. “Hey, as far as _I’m_ concerned, you two are the only family I’ve got. But _if_ ,” he says, carefully emphasizing the _if,_ because this is going to be presumptuous as fuck, otherwise _._ “ _If_ there are ever any more Belmonts, down the line—then yeah, I hope they _can_ count on you being a friend.”

“Always,” Adrian breathes, with no hesitation. He offers his hand out, palm up in invitation; Sypha’s settles into it, and Trevor wraps his around both of them, and for the first time in his life, the future doesn’t look so scary—not just the next few years or decades, but the _real_ future, the time he won’t be here to see but nevertheless knows, now, will be well taken care of.

* *

So they get up, after a while, and they walk the bank a ways, a stalling tactic to not have to end the night just yet. There are fruit trees lining shores of the stream, fat and heavy with the over-ripe remains of the season’s yield, and so the air is oversweet in that autumn-rot sort of way. It brings fallen leaves and wood fairies and bonfires to mind; It’s exactly the sort of night that lends itself to overthinking and ruminating and indulging ideas and thoughts that are so easily set aside in the light of day. It’s easy to get too hopeful, to get overambitious, on a night like this.

“…So,” Trevor says, after a prolonged stretch of silence. “I know that between the house and the castle, we’ve got a lot of projects already, and a bunch of other shit to worry about besides, but… I also want to fix the bestiary.” He’s trying to bring it up casually, not make it sound like some profound thing, because the weight it already has in present company is obvious. “It needs it.”

“Yes, it could use some editing,” Sypha says, traced with light sarcasm. “I could not believe the things it had to say about manticores!”

 _That_ throws his entire line of thought into a crooked spin; Trevor stops walking, looks to Sypha, searching for the joke, hoping for a punchline. 

There’s nothing. She just looks back at him curiously, as if she’s said the most normal thing in the world and _he’s_ the one being weird.

“What… do you know of manticores?” Adrian asks, and thank goodness; Trevor wasn’t keen on admitting that he’d never actually seen one of the things, nor had any other Belmonts in at least a few generations.

She smiles, and it’s the look of fond memory, of nostalgia. Starts walking again, forcing them to follow. “That they are much smaller than the book says—no larger than a farm cat. That they mostly eat cabbage and whatever other greenery they can find, not… babies, or dogs, or whatever else it says in there. And that they are attracted to magic users.”

“You’ve seen one,” Trevor says, because at this point it’s clearly not a question.

“I had one as a… companion, growing up,” she says. “Though I was not allowed to let the rest of the tribe see him.”

“What was its name?” Adrian asks, clearly thinking along the same lines as Trevor because if she _is_ making this up to bait them, she won’t have a name ready—

“Kitty,” she says, without hesitating, and oh god, whether she’s making this up or not it’s too much, it’s too _good._

“What?” she asks, as Trevor doesn’t even attempt to cover his laughter. “I was _five_ , five-year-olds are not creative!”

“Apparently not,” Adrian says, aiming for sarcasm but Trevor can see the way he’s smiling out of one half of his mouth, trying to hide it.

Sypha crosses her arms in a mock huff, continues that way for a few seconds before all of them lose it, giggling in the dark like children.

“...anyway,” Trevor gets out, finally. “I’m not talking about making edits. I’m talking about redoing it completely. From scratch.” A pause, to let the scale of the task set in. “And I want the two of you to help.”

No reply, at first. The space around Adrian vibrates with a different energy now, though. Not angry. Guarded. “That will take a while,” he says, voice just as carefully under control. “Pet manticores aside, there are a lot of entries to correct.”

Trevor nods, kicking idly at a stone in the grass. “Yeah. There really are.” Something occurs to him then, something he hasn’t thought of until this moment; it was all in the way Adrian stiffened when he said the word, _Bestiary._ “Was also thinking about changing the name.”

“To something that doesn’t imply mindless monstrosity in everything contained between its covers?”

“That’s the idea, yeah.”

“Your ancestors wouldn’t approve.”

 _Says the half-vampire son of Dracula that I gave the entire Belmont hold to._ “I can’t honestly think of the last thing I’ve done that they _would_ have approved of.”

Quiet for a moment, as they walk; the wind is picking up, and he can just about hear the gears turning in Adrian’s head.

“‘The Big Belmont Book of Things that Go Bump in the Night’, Adrian finally says, all profound seriousness, like it’s an actual suggestion.

Trevor rolls his eyes. “What is this, a book for kids?”

“Given what I’ve seen of Belmonts so far, very possibly.”

“How about ‘The Book of Monsters with Too Much Fucking Sass’. It’d be a short volume, though. Only one entry.”

“An Idiot’s Guide to—”

“The Belmont Family Compendium of Species,” Sypha says, sharp, cutting Adrian off. 

And… actually, huh. That’s pretty good. Neutral, kind of boring, but scholarly sounding. Like it takes itself seriously. “That works,” Trevor says, looking to Adrian for his vote of approval.

“Why are you looking at me?”

Trevor shrugs, exaggerated. “Oh, I don’t know—maybe because all our names are going on the nameplate, so they should be under a title we agree on.”

Adrian just _looks_ at him for a long moment; it seems like what Trevor’s suggesting is finally sinking in. A _Țepeș_ , on the authorship page of a Belmont tome. A definitive version, even, that will hold up and be in use for a very long time. The legacy of an entire dynasty of supernatural hunters boiled down to accurate, useful knowledge, and him with a hand in it.

“What do you need each of us to do?” Adrian asks, in lieu of a proper reply.

Trevor smirks a little; he knew Adrian would be on board, once he got the whole picture. “I can handle the general information—the stuff hunters need to know. Sypha, do you think you can do something from a magician’s angle? Powers, weaknesses, what spells to have on hand, that sort of thing?”

She laughs. “You know that I can.”

He rolls his eyes. “Then will—”

“And the argument could be made that you also know that I _will_.”

“Fine, never mind, I’ll just be rude and take your help for granted. Adrian?”

“Mm?”

“Any scientific shit you know would be a good addition to the text, though obviously a lot of these things follow their own rules. But what we really need is an artist. A good one. You’ve seen the kind of work it’ll need to stand up to.” Trevor clamps a hand onto Adrian’s shoulder, jostles him playfully. “Know anyone?”

And Adrian just laughs, face turned down to his boots. It’s more than a little self-deprecating. “If you’re trying to get me to flatter myself, it won’t work. I’d sooner let Sypha fill your book with stick figures.”

And, oh. Oh, wow. That would be—Sypha is good at many things, but—

“There is _charm_ ,” Sypha says, a touch defensive, “in simplicity.”

“Perhaps in the same way a child’s drawings are _charming_.”

“Since when are _you_ the rude one—”

“Fine, then _I’ll_ flatter you,” Trevor interrupts, in a tone he hopes conveys _this is galling_ even though really, it isn’t. “I’ve seen the shit you draw; you’re actually pretty damn good, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have illustrating this thing. There. Good enough, or do I need to actually beg?”

Adrian just nods, quiet enveloping him again. He’s smiling faintly for appearances, but he’s still off, and it’s not just because he’s a sensitive artiste. 

Trevor nudges him with his hip, a questioning sort of _hey, you okay over there?_

The question, when it comes, sounds haunted. “Are you intending to reproduce _all_ of the entries in the previous book?”

Ah. Right. _That_ issue; he’s a little surprised it’s taken this long to come up. It’s the kind of thing that would really benefit from a delicate touch, which is definitely not Trevor’s strong suit, so: bluntness instead. “I’ll be honest, I’m in favor of keeping it complete. The book’s meant to be useful, and it’s not like every dhampir is as good a person as you are. But I figured I’d leave it up to you. Do _you_ want that entry to be in it? If it is,” he adds quickly, “you’d be completely in charge of it, beginning to end.”

The night isn’t silent; the stream is rushing over rocks noisily, and there are evening birds calling somewhere nearby, and crickets singing away in the brush. Even their steps through the grass make sound, a quiet rustling. But it feels like silence, deep and endless, as Adrian contemplates.

“If we leave it out,” Adrian says finally, “then the final word on the subject will be that horrific entry in the previous book. I think I would rather correct that misinformation.” He looks at Trevor, raises an eyebrow, somehow a visible gesture despite the darkness. “On one condition.”

“Oh, no,” Trevor says, dry. “I feel my virtue being threatened.”

That earns laughs from Sypha, a more surprising one from Adrian, subdued as it is. He shakes his head again, a gesture that says _Belmont, you are ridiculous and awful._ “The _condition_ ,” he continues onward, “is that we also include an entry on humans.”

Huh. Trevor gives it a few seconds’ thought. It’s a strange suggestion—the whole point of the book is to give humans the information they need to fight all the other creatures of the world, and even if they’re not all mindless beasts, they’re all at least beings with the _potential_ for evil. Beings that can and do hurt people, that _kill_ people.

Sypha looks at him, eyebrow raised in challenge. It’s obvious that she’s in favor.

He thinks about the bishop of Greşit, about the nine-fingered thug and his one-eyed friend, and those slobs in the tavern ready to kill him for his name and the mob of people willing to kill the Speakers just for being different—thinks about Sypha’s parents and Adrian’s mother and his own entire family, all the evil men have wrought in just the last few decades. And he shrugs. “Sure. Why not? Humans are fucking troublemakers too. And you probably know more about us than we do.”

“I imagine so, given that you don’t even understand why your own wounds become infected.”

“Yes, I do. The _ground_ is _cursed_.”

He can just about hear Sypha roll her eyes. “If you got injured rolling around in a churchyard, and the wound still festered, would that be enough to convince you otherwise?”

Trevor smirks; they think they know so much, and maybe about scholarly stuff they do, but this is _his_ territory. “Depends on when the land was consecrated, by who, under what circumstances, and what’s gone on there since. It’s surprisingly easy to desanctify holy ground, if you know how.”

“That,” Adrian says, thoughtful, “sounds like something that should go into the volume we’re putting together.”

“Yeah?” Trevor asks, startling a swarm of crickets out of a tuft of tall grass. “Some sort of… general information chapter, about how all of this stuff works?”

“Section 37B,” Sypha intones, stodgy. “How to enrage God to the point that he damns the land you’re standing on.”

“Magical curses and how to cheat your way out of them,” Adrian adds.

“Salt,” Sypha says, giggling. “Not just tasty on stew!”

“Are we _ever_ ,” Trevor moans, “Going to get that chicken you promised?”

“I didn’t _promise—_ "

The path curves here, follows the stream, and they’re passing a particularly laden fruit tree—branches weighted down and drooping with clusters of sweet red pears. Through his laughter, Trevor notices movement out of the corner of his eye.

He sets a hand on Sypha’s wrist, squeezes Adrian’s shoulder. _Stop for a second._ He squints into the foliage. He’s not getting the sense of anything hostile, really, but these days…

“It’s just a game bird of some kind,” Adrian whispers. “Pheasant, partridge maybe.”

And maybe he should mostly be relieved that their night isn’t being ruined by some stupid fight, but all at once the only thing Trevor is aware of is how roaringly hungry he is; they never did manage dinner, and have spent way too long down here, letting dusk drift into full night. “You know… chicken stew, whatever, but I haven’t had pheasant in _ages_. Didn’t even realize I missed it until right now. If I had a bow…” He glances at Adrian, significantly. “Or a hunting dog...”

Adrian makes a noise halfway between exasperated laughter and a long-suffering sigh. He’s suddenly encircled by a thick curl of mist, and before Trevor can blink, the weight’s out from under his hand and there’s a huge white wolf stalking carefully toward the tree, its ability to sneak very questionable given the starkness of its fur against the darkened landscape. 

There’s a leap, and a mess of leaves and branches flying in all directions, and a short, almost comical chase—but when the wolf comes trotting back over to them, all jaunty self-satisfaction, the heavy forms of not one, but _two_ game birds are dangling from between his teeth.

Turns out they’re partridge after all, not pheasant, but Trevor finds he doesn’t care. Sypha starts them a fire right there in the grass, neatly contained like only magical fire can be, and they roast them up in their own buttery buckwheat-fed fat, pick the bones meticulously, eat and laugh and make dumb jokes at each other’s expense. At one point, Sypha leans in to give Adrian a tender, lingering thank-you kiss, gratitude for fetching dinner, the both of them painted in firelight like something fierce and golden and wild—then looks pointedly at Trevor as if to say, _you should say thank you, too._

Trevor does, straddling Adrian’s lap and kissing him until his vision starts to white out, until all he knows is the taste of birdfat and gamey meat threaded through with the tang of his own blood, and the feeling of Adrian’s body pressed spring-tight against his, fingernails digging into his shoulders—that wild, wind-dizzy imbalance of teetering on a dangerous edge. They’re far too exposed, and he knows that, but there’s a primitive part of him, instinct that goes back and back, that just wants to be naked in the moonlight—wants to disappear into the sweet grass with Sypha and let Adrian block out all the stars. Wants to let the sweat and flush of sex warm them against the chilling night and mark this thing between them as something apart from the bland, bullshit horrors of the rest of the world.

It’s around that moment—playing with risky fantasies is fine but it’s time to come up for air anyway—that they all hear a voice calling from far away. It’s distant but it sounds desperate and afraid and maybe even hopeful. Sypha locates the source instantly, pointing off a ways, where a silhouette is approaching through the shadows, flickering lantern in hand. From the north—from Acasă.

Trevor sighs; one day, one day, maybe they won’t have to worry about this, but for now, these people are all parochial to the core at best, spies for the church at worst—until proven otherwise. He detangles himself from Adrian, settles back down in the grass alongside; he can get to his feet with sword and whip in hand faster than most people can even get their hand to their weapon, and honestly, he’s earned a relaxed night.

In the end, he needn’t have worried. The man is unarmed, is looking for them for _help_ , not to cause trouble—something about his grandson being missing, monster this, demon that, blah blah—and so they invite him to sit by the fire with them, and offer him what scraps of the meat are left, and they hear his story.

Because the future is a finicky, tenuous thing, like Adrian’s shitty gearworks under Greşit; it needs constant maintenance and attention. It is built on big moments, the kind of events that shake and shape the world, but it’s built on small ones too: a pan of spice rolls, a garden coming into bloom, a moment of shared, horrific understanding over a long-dead child’s skull. An extra minute or two taken out of life to offer comfort to a terrified grandfather. 

These moments, and one more: the tumbling fall of a rusted coin into a well, tipping out of a child’s hand, and the way the splash echoes up from the depths, a reassuring reminder that _nothing is bottomless_. That it’s only a matter of being willing to go _deep_ enough, to wait long enough, for that echo to reach the ears.

And the future is built and shaped and crystallized, up and out and forward and onward, every moment of every day—even this one, right now, faces smeared in partridge fat and illuminated by magical flame as they tell the man: _It’ll be all right. It will._

It will be all right.

*

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;.; it's oveerrrrrrr. So sad!
> 
> Except that now it's time for PART 2: THE SEQUELING.
> 
> In all seriousness: Thank you, all of you, for sticking with me through this whole thing. Your kind words and questions and theories and investment has made me genuinely enjoy writing again in a way I haven't in years. And these three idiots deserve all the good we can give them.


End file.
